/diy/ - Do It Yourself

Ok so I know with IC interrupts you have a main program running and then an ISR starts when the interrupt is triggered and it runs then the IC goes back to its normal program. But how would you make the IC do nothing UNTIL an external signal is detected? Do you just run an empty loop the majority of the time and have the program you want to run be the ISR? Or is there usually a sleep mode or something used? My end goal is to the have an event trigger a program and then run continuously until the IC is manually reset.

>>818778
the thing is there's a ton of tutorials that make the thing basically legos with copy and paste code so a lot of people just play with it like that. It is pretty stupid to put a $30 board into something just to make LEDs blink but on the other hand, most people aren't engineers so learning to work directly with the chips is overkill.