UART strings with values for LED control

Projects Programming
1

Hi all,

I have successfully interfaced my digital LED stripes, and at the phase where i need to control them through UART.
I am trying to figure out a way where i can send strings with functions followed by parameters or simply just color values to begin with, in following fashion:

"ledbreath 254,235,232" or "ledblink 0,235,0"

Unfortunately this kind of parsing usually ends up in nasty spaghetti code, so i was hoping perhaps anybody had any experience on how to handle this particular technique?

Thanks in advance.

2

Unfortunately this kind of parsing usually ends up in nasty spaghetti code

That never happens to me. Sometimes I get ravioli or porkchops, but I've never gotten spaghetti.

What have you tried? Parsing the strings you show is very straightforward, IF they are strings.

3

PaulS:

Unfortunately this kind of parsing usually ends up in nasty spaghetti code

That never happens to me. Sometimes I get ravioli or porkchops, but I've never gotten spaghetti.

What have you tried? Parsing the strings you show is very straightforward, IF they are strings.

Nice to hear from a pasta lover :slight_smile:

What i have done so far is sending following sequence:
"ledblink\n"
"234\n"
"220\n"
"234\n\r"

Which i have implemented in a statemachine, not so elegant, but quite quick and dirty. I would rather send "ledblink 234,0,23\n" in one sequence and parse this.

4

I would rather send "ledblink 234,0,23\n" in one sequence and parse this.

So, do it. Collect the data in a string (a NULL terminated char array), and then use strtok() to parse it, and atoi() to convert (some of) the tokens to numbers.

5

PaulS:

I would rather send "ledblink 234,0,23\n" in one sequence and parse this.

So, do it. Collect the data in a string (a NULL terminated char array), and then use strtok() to parse it, and atoi() to convert (some of) the tokens to numbers.

I fell over this example you have made: Arduino 2560R3: Receiving a stream of data over UART - #7 by system - Networking, Protocols, and Devices - Arduino Forum

But is there a chance that i can tokenize the char array you accumulate all the data into?

6 
  char * pch;
  pch = strtok (inData,"< ,>");
  while (pch != NULL)
  {
    Serial.println(pch);
    pch = strtok (NULL, "< ,>");
  }

Did the trick i assume..

7

Did the trick i assume..

Didn't you test?

There are no < or > in the inData array, so they will never trigger the end of a token. Not much point of including them.