I have a similar issue. I have a interactive game being controlled by devices over the serial port. I am running a counter using the main draw() loop and setting variables in singleton classes using the input from the hardware devices over serial. The problem is that when I am sending or receiving data over serial you notice the counter stop while the data is being transferred. I have tried various methods of implementing threads to handle the I/O but am having no luck... is I/O excluded from multi threading?

I have an example I am trying to get working withing the context of my game... maybe someone can point out an error or offer some advice.

*** This is the test class I am calling that does output to the console

public class TestThread implements Runnable{

     public void run() {
           // TODO Auto-generated method stub
     }
     public TestThread(int num){
           for(int i = 0; i< num ; i++){
                 System.out.println("INSIDE THREAD" + i);
           }
     }
}//end class

*** I am calling it by doing the following once from my main draw() loop. The main draw loop freezes while the "thread" finishes its output to the console.

  Runnable runnable = new TestThread(10000000);
  Thread thread = new Thread(runnable);
  thread.start();

Any help would be greatly appreciated.