On Do, Nov 14, 2013 at 02:56:43 +0100, Andrew Wagner wrote:
>Hello,
>
>I wrote a simple lua script that bangs the servos back and forth in a
>while loop, for stress testing. To prevent our (flying) robot from
>crashing when a user reflexively hits Ctrl-C, I have a signal handler
>set up in one of our components to trap that, so I can't just break
>out of the while loop with Ctrl-C.
>
>I googled it, and lua does not provide keyboard handling in it's
>standard library.
>
>I know about state rfsm state machines library that could probably be
>used, but it is probably overkill for trivial scripts like this.
>
>What is a good way to terminate my while loop in this situation?
>
>Note, I'm still a lua newb... maybe the standard library has
>lightweight threads or something that will return control to the
>interpreter or something, and I just don't know about it...

You probably can find some lua ncurses (or alike) library to do
non-blocking io from the keyboard to end your loop.

Alternatively, just create a LuaComponent, add a periodicActivity and
run your your servo-banging script in it's updateHook. Then you can just
use the deployer of your choice to run start() and stop() to turn it on
and off.

Markus