Cooperative Task Scheduler for Entry Level Microcontrollers

Abstract

For low complexity systems, entry level microcontrollers are well suited because they are cheaper, smaller, and require less energy to operate. Many of these systems require multiple data inputs and outputs, and in most of the cases, these processes must be scheduled as accurate as possible. One of the possibilities to accomplish this is to use delay routines in order to run different operations after a specified amount of time. A major drawback of this approach is that while it is in a delay routine, the microcontroller cannot do other tasks aside from interrupt requests, and it is becoming difficult to program multiple data flows. In this paper, we propose a cooperative task scheduler which needs very few resources and it is able to accurately schedule multiple tasks. We also implemented our scheduler and tested it on an entry level microcontroller.