How to update glut window continuously?

Question

I have a real robot that is ordering my virtual robot in open gl. I want show every movement of my master robot(real robot) in slave (virtual one in open gl) online, so i ne

Answer 1

GLUT offers you a idle callback (void (*)(void) signature), set through glutIdleFunc. Retrieve the robot input data in the idle handler. Or use a separate thread polling the data, filling data structures; use a semaphore to unlock idle after new data arrived, use a locking with timeout so that your program remains interactive. Pseudocode:

Semaphore robot_data_semaphore;

void wait_for_data(void)
{
    SemaphoreLockStatus lock_status = 
        semaphore_raise_timeout(robot_data_semaphore, RobotDataTimeout);
    if( lock_status == SEMAPHORE_RAISED ) {
        update_scene_with_robot_data();
        semaphore_lower(robot_data_semaphore);
        glutPostRedisplay();
    }
}

void main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
/* ... */
    semaphore_init(robot_data_semaphore);
    Thread thread_robot_data_poller = thread_create(robot_data_poller);
    glutIdleFunc(wait_for_data);

/* ... */
    thread_start(thread_robot_data_poller);
    glutMainLoop();
}