Watch Ben Heck Build a Remote Expedition Camera! -- Episode 20

Hey Ben,

I liked this episode, but I had a suggestion to make your life easier. When you've got code that you want to remove easily from some builds (like serial debugs, or different peripheral options) of your firmware, use preprocessor defines.

There's a couple ways to to this. The easiest would be to wrap each block where you're outputting serial data with an ifdef, eg.

#ifdef SERIAL_DEBUG

  Serial.println("Hello World");

  Serial.print("Another Line, manually returned\r\n");

#endif //SERIAL_DEBUG

Then you can simple put the following line at the top of your file when you want to have the printing enabled.

#define SERIAL_DEBUG

Another more advanced technique would be to create a preprocessor function to do the printing, like follows. I don't use Arduino much, so I can't guarantee it will work, but it will in most C compilers

#define SERIAL_DEBUG

#ifdef SERIAL_DEBUG

  PRINT(X) Serial.print(X)

  PRINT(X,Y) Serial.print(X,Y)

  PRINTLN(X) Serial.println(X)

  WRITE(X) Serial.write(X)

#else

  PRINT(X)

  PRINT(X,Y)

  PRINTLN(X)

  WRITE(X)

#endif //SERIAL_DEBUG

Then in your code, you can simply use those functions instead of the Serial functions, there's no need for any other diff files.

David

Hey Ben,

I liked this episode, but I had a suggestion to make your life easier. When you've got code that you want to remove easily from some builds (like serial debugs, or different peripheral options) of your firmware, use preprocessor defines.

There's a couple ways to to this. The easiest would be to wrap each block where you're outputting serial data with an ifdef, eg.

#ifdef SERIAL_DEBUG

  Serial.println("Hello World");

  Serial.print("Another Line, manually returned\r\n");

#endif //SERIAL_DEBUG

Then you can simple put the following line at the top of your file when you want to have the printing enabled.

#define SERIAL_DEBUG

Another more advanced technique would be to create a preprocessor function to do the printing, like follows. I don't use Arduino much, so I can't guarantee it will work, but it will in most C compilers

#define SERIAL_DEBUG

#ifdef SERIAL_DEBUG

  PRINT(X) Serial.print(X)

  PRINT(X,Y) Serial.print(X,Y)

  PRINTLN(X) Serial.println(X)

  WRITE(X) Serial.write(X)

#else

  PRINT(X)

  PRINT(X,Y)

  PRINTLN(X)

  WRITE(X)

#endif //SERIAL_DEBUG

Then in your code, you can simply use those functions instead of the Serial functions, there's no need for any other diff files.

David