Patterns in the Machine: A Software Engineering Guide to Embedded Development

© John T. Taylor, Wayne T. Taylor 2021

J. T. Taylor, W. T. TaylorPatterns in the Machinehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-6440-9_10

10. Finite State Machines

John T. Taylor¹   and Wayne T. Taylor²

(1)

Covington, GA, USA

(2)

Golden, CO, USA

 

State machines, or finite state machines (FSM), are handy-dandy tools for providing a deterministic framework for your application to deal with asynchronous behaviors. These are things like

• Software timers

• Communication protocols

• Hardware interrupts

• User events

• Polled events

Here is a good, general-purpose definition of what a state machine is:

A finite-state machine (FSM) is a mathematical model of computation . It is an abstract machine that can be in exactly one of a finite number of states at any given time. The FSM ...