Thread: Trying to create a non-blocking timer, that counts time in between keypresses

For the life of me I can't get this to go together, any help would be appreciated. One very important note, the below case statement can not block the user from pressing other keys on the keyboard and and being able to manipulate their functions (e.g. press R increases temperature by 1)

User presses 'z', this triggers the "silence" mode of my alarm. The looping sound I have in my program stops (that works). Then what I need from this case statement is to:

1: start a timer, so that if the user does not press 'z' again within 5 seconds it will automatically break out of the 'silence' condition and start the looping sound again

2: the user can manually pause the silence condition, by pressing 'z' before the 5 seconds is up.

Here's what I have, and the functions below that are called

Code:

case 'Z':                
case 'z':

time(&timeOfMute);

if(isSilenceValid() == TRUE)
         {


          if((currentTime - timeOfMute) >= 1)
            {
               setSilencedState(FALSE);
               printf("this works");
               break;
            }
          else
               setSilencedState(FALSE);
          }
      else setSilencedState(TRUE);

       break;

here are the two functions called above

Code:

char isSilenceValid(){
    
return silenceIsValid;

}

Code:

char isAverageValid(){
    
return averageIsValid;

}

i would use a state machine structure and run it outside of the switch statement so it gets executed on every loop. use keystrokes and timers as inputs

Code:

state = 0;
...
loop
....
    switch() {
     ...
    case 'z':
        z_pressed = 1;
        break;
    ...
    } // end of switch

    // alarm handler
    switch(state) {
    case 0:
    	// waiting for input, alarm is active
    	setSilencedState(FALSE);
    	if (z_pressed) {
    		setSilencedState(TRUE);
    		time(&timeOfMute);
    		state = 1;
    	}
    	break;
    case 1:
    	// silenced, watch for 'z' again or timeout
    	time(&current_time);
    	if (z_pressed) {
    		// manually pause (not sure what that means)
    		// restart timer?
    		time(&timeOfMute);
    		// or cancel the silence?
    		state = 0;
    	}
    	else if ((current_time - timeOfMute) > timeout_value) {
    		// reactivate the alarm
    		state = 0;
    	}
    	break;
    default:
    	// error
    	break;
    }
    z_pressed = 0;
    
...
end of loop