writting to buffer from serial input

Question

Can some one explain this behaviour please, i have the following code

 byte buffer[512];
 byte block;
 byte len;
 Serial.setTimeout(60000L) ; // wait until 20 seconds for input from serial
 // Ask personal data: Family name
 Serial.println(F("Type text followed by #"));
 len = Serial.readBytesUntil('#', (char *) buffer, 500) ; // read from serial
 Serial.print(len);
 for (byte i = len; i < 250; i++) buffer[i] = '#'; // pad with #
 Serial.print(len);

This works but if i change the "for" line to any thing higer then 250 it stops working and there is a "buffer out of memory condition)

My question is why can't the for loop say the below as the buffer size is 512?

for (byte i = len; i < 512; i++) buffer[i] = '#'; 

Am i right in thinking it has something to do with (Char *), i did copy this code from the example ardunio code and was jsut trying to incress the lenth of input it accpeted.

Answer 1

A byte can only contain values from 0 to 255 (including).

So my guess it works for values until 255.

You should use a different type, e.g. unsigned int or unsigned short.

for (unsigned short i = len; i < 250; i++) buffer[i] = '#'; // pad with #

Also, I advise to use a constant or define for the buffer size, now you have 3 values (512, 500 and 250 in the loop, I assume they should be based on the same value).

About the char*: Looking at StreamReadBytesUntil, it seems that the parameter wants a char* instead of a byte* (which is more or less the same), but it's better to cast to show the parameter is of type char* since that is high likely the exact type (but the official Arduino documentation does not show the parameter types sadly).

• Juraj: for len is byte small too
• Michel Keijzers: @See Juraj's remark ... btw, unless you know beforehand you might run into memory problems, always use int or unsigned int. Or if you want to do it better, create a specific type for it: typedef unsigned short buffer_length
• Michel Keijzers: Personally I like to use types as int8_t, uint8_t, int16_t, uint16_t, int32_t, uint32_t and bool ... some of them are predefined, some are not. But this way I always know exactly what ranges I can use. When a range could change in the future, I use a typedef and give if a specific name, like I said above (typedef uint16_t buffer_size). That saves a lot of type replacement when changed.
• RubberDuck: I seem to remember problems using unsigned as types for loop indexes. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.
• Michel Keijzers: @RubberDuck Yes, for example, if you count down, you cannot check for >= 0, because an unsigned value always is >= 0, but for counting up (until value 254 max) an unsigned byte can be used.