Alright I have a half complete Arduino sketch at the moment. Basically the sketch below will blink an LED on a kegboard-mini shield if a string of chars equals *{blink_Flow_A}*
A state machine (at it's simplest - it can be lots more complicated) can be just a set of conditional statements (if/else or switch/case) where you do certain behaviors based on the state of a variable, and also change that variable state. So it can be thought of as a way of handling or progressing through a series of conditions.
So you have the state of your LED/valve - it is either blinking (open) or not blinking (closed). In pseudo code here:
boolean LED_state = false; //init to false/closed
void loop(){
if (checkForCorrectCommand() == true){ //
if (LED_State == false){
open_valve();
LED_State = true;
} else {
close_valve();
LED_State = false;
}
}
}
The blinking LED part should be easy to implement if you get the gist of the code above. The checkForCorrectCommand()
bit is a function you write for checking whatever your input is - key, serial, button, etc. It should return a boolean.