Achieving acceptable functionality (wrt Cloud blocking / reconnection)

[rickkas7]

Particle.publish is likely the source of most of your blocking issues in SYSTEM_THREAD(ENABLED) mode.

Particle publish and blocking

It can be a bit confusing knowing whether a call to Particle.publish will be blocking. This note will hopefully clear some thing up. Note: All of the behaviors described here are for system firmware 0.7.0. Earlier versions behave differently. All of the logs were taken on an Electron, though the behaviors are similar (but generally faster) on the Photon/P1. Updates to this document and the full example source can be found here. The basics Publish is a way to send some data to the cloud. Ther…

There are a number of techniques in that post of things you can do to mitigate the blocking.

However, in order to make the most responsive UI, I'd handle that from a thread, with a few caveats:

• If you use a shared resource like I2C or SPI, you can use it from a thread, but you need to either never use it from the main thread, or add guards to prevent both your thread and the loop thread from using it at the same time.
• Serial is fine from a thread.
• Do not make any Particle calls from your UI thread, otherwise you'll be back into the situation where blocking occurs,

This post explains some more of the caveats of using threads:

Particle threads tutorial

Particle threads tutorial Threads allow concurrent execution of multiple bits of code. They’re popular in desktop operating systems like Windows and in languages like Java. Threads have limited support in the Particle platform, but exist. Though the semantics are a bit different, you might use threads in the same way you would use separate processes in Unix as well. Updated versions of this document can be found in Github. Say no to threads While this is a thread tutorial, in most cases you c…

With system thread enabled your thread should run almost perfectly at 1000 times per second, even when connecting to the cloud at the same time.

There are a few situations in 0.7.0 where the networking code blocks. These should be fixed in 0.8.0 which should be released soon.