The Blink Plug has two pushbuttons and two LEDs. The buttons are simple miniature switches, but nothing is ever simple in microcontroller-land: reading out the state of a pushbutton reliably can be deceptively hard, due to mechanical bounce issues.

The Ports library has had a BlinkPlug class for some time now, including a “pushed()” function to do all the debouncing. Unfortunately, that function turned out to be a bit harder to use than I originally intended.

Time to add some more code to the BlinkPlug class!

I’ve added a new “buttonCheck()” member, which returns events instead of state. That makes it a lot easier to detect when people press a button, which is usually all you’re after anyway.

Here’s a new button_demo.pde example sketch, which illustrates the new functionality:

Sample output:

As you can see, it’s now a lot simpler to detect when people press or release one of the two buttons on a Blink Plug. Each time you call buttonCheck(), you’ll get one of the following events:

ALL_OFF, ON1, OFF1, ON2, OFF2, SOME_ON.

You have to keep calling “buttonCheck()” reasonably often, at least 10 times per second, if you don’t want to miss any events. Calling it all the time in the main loop is fine. Keep in mind that ON1, etc. will be returned only once for each actual button press.

You can still call “state()” whenever you want, to check the position of either button. But when you use buttonCheck(), you should not call the old – now deprecated – “pushed()” function, as these two will interfere with each other.

This code is now part of the Ports library (subversion and ZIP). Gory details are in Ports.cpp, near line 230.