Handling serial input on Arduino with interrupts on a specific character

Question

I'm working on an educational robotics project that should allow control of the robot over Bluetooth. The robot is an off-the-shelf robot with a serial interface that the Arduino is driving normally autonomously.

I'm trying to allow users to write a series of commands to the Bluetooth serial port (connected to hardware serial pins or software serial pins) while the automation is still running and when they send a new-line, the series of commands is sent to other parts of the robot.

I've used other microcontrollers and written a simple interrupt routine when a pin is pulled high or low, but I am not sure how to handle an interrupt on a character. I think that an interrupt is the best way to do this, but I haven't had much experience with Arduino, so there many be functionality I'm not aware off.

TL;DR: If I want the Arduino to execute code when a certain character arrives on a serial port, should I use an interrupt method?

I also want to add, as this is an educational project, I would like to stay fully on Arduino, several friends and colleagues have recommended alternate chips or MCUs that would have the functionality but I want to stay friendly to new programmers and engineers.

Related: Serial interrupts? (unspecific title, but the question is "If I do not use Serial anywhere in my Arduino sketch, is it safe to create my own interrupt handlers for USART_RXC etc. and to directly manipulate the USART registers?". To which the answer is "yes") — Peter Mortensen
– Peter Mortensen, Commented Oct 4, 2022 at 20:54

Peter Mortensen · Accepted Answer · 2022-09-08 18:08:18Z

1

The built-in HardwareSerial does not have support for interrupt-driven handling of characters. Many sketches are OK with the typical polling approach:

while (Serial.available()) {
  char c = Serial.read();

  // Code that watches for certain characters
  .
  .
  .
}

There's nothing about what you describe that requires interrupts, but you could use an extended version of HardwareSerial that I wrote (modified), called NeoHWSerial. It calls a function that you provide from the interrupt service routine (see documentation).

edited Sep 8, 2022 at 18:08

Peter Mortensen

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answered Nov 22, 2015 at 2:40

slash-dev

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