I'm driving a pump with electronic pulses. Writing a "1" to a file generates a pulse. The write itself takes several tens of milliseconds. The delay isn't the same each time. I want to start one write exactly every 500 milliseconds.

My idea using threads:

1. A "pulse writing" thread writes a pulse to the 
file when it receives a semaphore signal.

2. Time::HiRes clock_nanosleep (or similar) runs in the
main thread sending a signal precisely every 500msec 
to the "pulse writing" thread.

[download]

Does this seem like a good way to go? Anyone done anything like this before? The tricky thing is that the writing time is somewhat variable and blocks until done, so I can't just do it all in one thread I don't think. Or maybe I'm a little thread-happy since I just learned them?

Thanks much!

In reply to Any ideas for using perl as a simple pulse generator? by bfreemer

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