ExtendedSerial

Extended Serial Library for the Arduino

This library provides a some simple wrappers for the arduino serial ports to enable reliabale message receiving, along with a few other small utilities. the library was designed to be as small as possible to allow inclusion on any board type.

#####Note##### This library requires a version of the STL for Arduino, either from http://andybrown.me.uk/wk/2011/01/15/the-standard-template-library-stl-for-avr-with-c-streams/, https://github.com/maniacbug/StandardCplusplus or another implementation that provides std::string.

###Functions# The following functions are curently available:

void ES::clearSerial(HardwareSerial*, bool)
void ES::waitForContact(HardwareSerial*, unsigned int, unsigned int)
bool ES::recv(HardwareSerail*, ES::message&)

###clearSerial### Usage: ES::clearSerial(*HardwareSerial* _Serial = &Serial, bool _delay = true)

This function takes a pointer to a HardwareSerial port and a bool determing whether to delay for 1ms when the serialport is empty to allow any outstanding data to flow in and be cleared.

###waitForContact### Usage: ES::waitForContact(HardwareSerial* _Serial = &Serial, unsigned int _delayms = 250, unsigned int _interval = 8)

This function waits for data to appear on the specified serialport before allowing the program to continue - generally used in setup() to force the program to wait for any external components to be ready.

###recv### Usage ES::recv(HardwareSerial* _Serial, ES::message&)

recv wire format is as follows:

Size of the data part of the message in decimal notation
single space (0x20) character
Date of the message
single null (0x00) character

This function takes 2 arguments, the serialport to receive on, and a reference to a message struct, and returns a bool whether a valid message is available. To use it, create a persistant variable of type ES::message that will store the message being recieved, and call it. if it returns true, there is a vaild message available, else there is a partial message or no message available. any user code that modifies the contents of the ES::message struct will result in either a false positive, or a discarded valid message.

Example

ES::message serialData;
void loop() {
    if (recv(&Serial, serialData)) {
        //your work here
    }
}