Blocking Serial read?

Projects Programming
1

Is it possible (or does it even make sense) for a blocking Serial.read() type of function? I am very new to the arduino and just hacking around with it. What I'm basically trying to do is prompt for a string, block for the input, then print it back out (or something like that.) It appears not to be doing that. It keeps processing the code in the loop() Is there a way to do that? Or is that not even really something that "makes sense" in this context?

Thanks.

2

It could make sense for some types of application to simply block waiting for serial IO. Serial.available() could be used to achieve blocking. Something like this:

while (Serial.available() == 0)
   /* just wait */ ;

/* read the incoming byte
 */
incomingByte = Serial.read();
3

Thanks, I will give that a try. Does that actually block or does it basically just poll for an available byte before proceeding? It doesn't really matter for what I am trying to do, I am just trying to understand how it is working.

4

Both. It waits there until a character comes.