Hi there.
It was was bothering me for a very long time how does Arduino or any other micro controller knows when to stop counting button presses?
For example when I press once light1 turns on/off, then twice light2 and so on.
What if I have only 3 lights and and I have pressed 3 times within 3 seconds and then after couple of minutes I want to turn off the light3 and I press 3 times again.
How does arduino know that it should be 3 presses rather than 6 (3 current and 3 past presses)?
Is there any way that you can define time for input and then reset the timer?
/*
State change detection (edge detection)
Often, you don't need to know the state of a digital input all the time,
but you just need to know when the input changes from one state to another.
For example, you want to know when a button goes from OFF to ON. This is called
state change detection, or edge detection.
This example shows how to detect when a button or button changes from off to on
and on to off.
The circuit:
* pushbutton attached to pin 2 from +5V
* 10K resistor attached to pin 2 from ground
* LED attached from pin 13 to ground (or use the built-in LED on
most Arduino boards)
created 27 Sep 2005
modified 30 Aug 2011
by Tom Igoe
This example code is in the public domain.
http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/ButtonStateChange
*/
// this constant won't change:
const int buttonPin = 2; // the pin that the pushbutton is attached to
const int ledPin = 13; // the pin that the LED is attached to
// Variables will change:
int buttonPushCounter = 0; // counter for the number of button presses
int buttonState = 0; // current state of the button
int lastButtonState = 0; // previous state of the button
void setup() {
// initialize the button pin as a input:
pinMode(buttonPin, INPUT);
// initialize the LED as an output:
pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);
// initialize serial communication:
Serial.begin(9600);
}
void loop() {
// read the pushbutton input pin:
buttonState = digitalRead(buttonPin);
// compare the buttonState to its previous state
if (buttonState != lastButtonState) {
// if the state has changed, increment the counter
if (buttonState == HIGH) {
// if the current state is HIGH then the button
// wend from off to on:
buttonPushCounter++;
Serial.println("on");
Serial.print("number of button pushes: ");
Serial.println(buttonPushCounter);
}
else {
// if the current state is LOW then the button
// wend from on to off:
Serial.println("off");
}
}
// save the current state as the last state,
//for next time through the loop
lastButtonState = buttonState;
// turns on the LED every four button pushes by
// checking the modulo of the button push counter.
// the modulo function gives you the remainder of
// the division of two numbers:
if (buttonPushCounter % 4 == 0) {
digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);
} else {
digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);
}
}