Non-blocking incrementation with single button pressure

Question

I am looking for a way to increment a variable by one each time a button is pressed. Current approach is the following :

    if (redButton.isPressed())
    {
        a++;
        delay(100);
    }

isPressed() just return true if the pin state is HIGH.

delay(100) is used to compensate the small amount of time the button is being pressed. Otherwise a would be incremented multiple times in a single press. But it's blocking behavior, my program can't do anything else during that delay.

In short I'm looking to add a method in my Button class to detect if the button "has just been released".

Answer 1

In your approach a button press will be detected every 100ms when you just keep the button pressed. So you have to set a flag when the button is pressed. When the button is not pressed while your flag is set, that's the event you're looking for. In this way you can detect both a button press and a release respectively. As @JRobert mentioned, there still has to be an amount of time between two calls to such a routine to provide some button debouncing.

bool pressed_flag=false;
bool button_timestamp=millis();
uint16_t button_period=100;

if(millis()-button_timestamp>button_period){
  button_timestamp=millis();
  if(redButton.isPressed() && !pressed_flag){
    // button has just been pressed
    // you can do sth. here
    pressed_flag=true;
  }
  else if(!redButton.isPressed() && pressed_flag){
    // button has just been released
    // you can do sth. here
    pressed_flag=false;
  }
}