12 years, 7 months ago.

Thread variables

Hi there. Maybe I missed it because it's late and I'm tired. Is there a way to create an RTOS Thread "variable" that can be used repeatedly? I'm writing a lighting controller sequence where the main loop takes input from a serial device - a value 0 through 8 - and runs a sequence based on the input. Some sequences need a thread to keep looping indefinitely until another sequence value is read from the serial device, where other sequences are finite - they have a start and a finish - and can run as a discrete function and don't need a thread. My main loop reads a serial value, and, based on that value, either calls a discrete function, or starts a thread to run a sequence until another serial code stops it. Something like this:

Thread modeThread( doNothingThread );
while (1) {
  // serial code received
  modeThread.terminate();
  if ( serialCodeForDiscreteSequence )
    runSequence;
  else
    Thread modeThread( someContinuingSequence );
}

I'm getting:

<<quote>>"modeThread": has already been declared in the current scope <</quote>>

(Actually, the code isn't 100% accurate, since the scopes are, in truth, different, but it's still illustrative).

I'd like something like:

Thread *threadPointer

so I could reuse the thread variable for any of a number of tasks to run, rather than create a specific thread for each possible sequence. Is this possible? Thanks!