[shoo]

ivanilves, thank you for writing this up and sharing the code & the video of the end result, it is a fun project!

As a thought experiment I've had a play to see what the state machine logic might look like if we try to replace the bool state variables with a set of explicit finite states, and to push the state transition logic into a pure function. Results are here: https://gist.github.com/fcostin/851c1b4d1e3cb75ba972408151f1...

It is more verbose, but one advantage of structuring it like this (that i've only partially succeeded at) is that state transitions only happen at most once per each call to advance_state. Might make it easier to read through and follow the logic. It also makes the state transition logic easy to unit test, since it is pure-functional instead of being mixed together with sensing and doing actions (unsure how much of a concern or possibility unit testing is with ino files, I've never done any arduino dev myself).

Not sure if this is anything like what SomeoneFromCA was thinking.

[ivanilves]

Thanks for your code, looks like this can help improving my state machine indeed. I'll try to apply that approach when I get my next slice of free time ;)