Serial Input Basics

Using Arduino Programming Questions
37

Nice code! Though one problem with using

while (Serial.available()) {
  Serial.read();
}

to clear the input buffer (your last advice) is that it happens very fast, which means that we can easily be in a situation when the next character has not yet been received, so the loop will exit and fail to 'clear' the buffer (unless I'm doing something wrong, in which case please correct me :slight_smile: ). One can easily test this by introducing

while (Serial.available()) {
  Serial.read();
  delayMicroseconds(10);
}

which even at 115200 baud rate will still be insufficient to keep up with the input; if you change 10 to 100, it starts to work.

So to alleviate that, we either have to introduce this (somewhat artificial) delay, or wait for the terminating character using something like

Serial.readStringUntil(endMarker);

which also has a nice feature of timing out after 1s (that can be changed with Serial.setTimeout()) if no ending marker is provided.