Hands-On RTOS with Microcontrollers

Introducing interrupts 

Polling for a single event is not only wasteful in terms of CPU cycles and power – it also results in a system that isn't responsive to anything else, which should generally be avoided. So then, how can we get a single core processor to do things in parallel? Well, we can't – there's only one processor after all. . . but since our processor is likely to be running millions of instructions per second, it is possible to get it to perform things that are close enough to parallel. MCUs also include dedicated hardware for generating interrupts. Interrupts provide signals to the MCU that allow it to jump directly to an interrupt service routine (ISR) when the event occurs. This is such a critical piece of functionality that ...