Thread: Buffer

Hi,

I'm a Uni' student from down South. We have an assignment to create a buffer and buffer/unbuffer values for a potentiometer, accelerometer, job stick and buttons from ARM boards the Uni' has recently bought.

I'm not asking anyone to ANSWER my question; just a little advice for a really stuck student.

Do I need to define a struct for it, or simply an array? If the latter; do I implement its circular functionality in a method, or?

How do I implement semaphores and mutex (which are part of the specification)?

Thanks,

Dave

Circular buffer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I can't answer a lot of your questions, but there are no methods in C. Structs are used whenever you have a lot of variables, that all are attached to one object (no oop though).

For instance, a student might have a struct with members of:
char firstName[30]
char lastName[32]
unsigned long int IDNumber
char major[30]
float gpa
int gradeLevel
char advisor[30]

so keeping track of lots of students with just separate arrays for each of these variables, would be a PITA, truly. As a struct, it's simple to access whatever you want:
studs.firstName, etc.

with the dot member access operator. Then you can make arrays of these structs, and really keep a massive amount of data, right at your fingertips:
studs[i].firstName, etc.

In C, a struct is equivalent to a record and a struct member (like firstName), serves as a record field, in some other languages.

Welcome to the forum, DireStraight, and Good luck with your project.

An array is adequate if all the elements are of the same data type. For example, "potentiometer, accelerometer, job stick and buttons" may all be numeric, in which case, great!

You could have an Nx4 array.

Then you have to decide whether you want FIFO (first-in-first-out) or FILO (first-in-last-out). For your buffer application, you probably want FIFO. One pointer (or index) into the array would keep track of the current/next place to enter new data. The other pointer/index is what is being processed. This lags behind.

Yes, "circular" sounds like the best approach. The indexes simply wrap back to the beginning once they reach the end. Your buffer needs to have enough elements for worst-case.