Thread: Time Delay

Hi, everyone. Right is may turn out to be really simple thing to do, but i am not sure how to approach it.

I have to develop a traffic light simulator, for a junction (consisting of one major busy road and one minor), now the problem is have to doing the traffic lights.

I want to know is it possible to execute code within C repeatly over and over for a certain amount of time (i.e how long the each traffic lights will operate for), before moving on to some other code?

PS. any ideas on how to approach the above project (traffic light simulator), would be help full.

regards
Boaz

I want to know is it possible to execute code within C repeatly over and over for a certain amount of time (i.e how long the each traffic lights will operate for), before moving on to some other code?

Sure, just set the on/off flag for the light and then call a sleep function like sleep int unistd.h, Sleep in windows.h or delay from dos.h depending on your system for however long you need. If you ARE the system you have should have control of the embedded timing procedures. As a last resort you can build your own sleep function inside C, but it's pretty antisocial since it blocks everything on a mulitasking system. As such, I don't recommend using things like the following unless you have control and don't mind assuming that you're the most important program running.

Code:

void SLEEP(long length)
{
    clock_t done = clock() + (clock_t)(length * CLOCKS_PER_SEC);

    while (clock() < done)
        ;
}

If he is in DOS, multitasking won't matter too much...

Delay is simple enough... I implemented in some code I stuck someplace and forgot where... Somebody needs to add a code button in the reply.

Code:

delay(number_of_milliseconds);