Arduino under the Hood (Task Scheduling)

Scheduling Tasks in Arduino and AVR Architectures

What you'll learn
Scheduling for AVR/Arduino Architectures
Parallel Programming for Embedded Systems

Requirements
Arduino under the Hood course or equivalent
Basic Linux Knowledge (How to navigate in a terminal, how to invoke programs)
Working knowledge about AVR aechitectures and embedded systems
Description
This course is for experts with immediate knowledge in Arduino/AVR architectures. It takes existing knowledge further and applies it to execute a program that is divided into several tasks. Those tasks can then run while the CPU idles, interleaving the computational part of the tasks resulting in a faster overall program execution and lower power consumption. Therefore, instead of manually interleaving tasks to increase the efficiency of the embedded system with the goal to prolong the battery life by increasing the sleep periods, the interleaving is handled automatically and dynamically adapting to the current situation without impacting the readability of the source code. In this course existing solutions are presented and one of them is explored in extensive depth.

The course covers topics such as

The Operating System and the Kernel

Scheduler for the Arduino Platform and AVR architecture

Preemptive scheduling policy

Cooperative scheduling policy

Inter-Process Communication (IPC)

Semaphore/Mutex

Channel/Queue

Existing Schedulers for Arduino

Modification and Implementation of a low-power Scheduler for the AVR architecture

The course ends with a practical session, in which an adaption of a scheduler depending on the Arduino platform is presented. The modified scheduler is then further extended to support sleep modes in the exercise. As usual, the complete exercise includes several hints and a possible solution.

Who this course is for:
Intermediate Embedded Systems Engineers
Developers who are curious about a simple way to schedule several tasks in AVR/Arduino

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