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 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.