Book Image

Hands-On Embedded Programming with C++17

By : Maya Posch
5 (1)
Book Image

Hands-On Embedded Programming with C++17

5 (1)
By: Maya Posch

Overview of this book

C++ is a great choice for embedded development, most notably, because it does not add any bloat, extends maintainability, and offers many advantages over different programming languages. Hands-On Embedded Programming with C++17 will show you how C++ can be used to build robust and concurrent systems that leverage the available hardware resources. Starting with a primer on embedded programming and the latest features of C++17, the book takes you through various facets of good programming. You’ll learn how to use the concurrency, memory management, and functional programming features of C++ to build embedded systems. You will understand how to integrate your systems with external peripherals and efficient ways of working with drivers. This book will also guide you in testing and optimizing code for better performance and implementing useful design patterns. As an additional benefit, you will see how to work with Qt, the popular GUI library used for building embedded systems. By the end of the book, you will have gained the confidence to use C++ for embedded programming.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Concurrency


With a few exceptions, MCUs are single-core systems. Multitasking is not something that is generally done; instead, there's a single thread of execution with timers and interrupts adding asynchronous methods of operation.

Atomic operations are generally supported by compilers and AVR is no exception. The need for atomic blocks of instructions can be seen in the following cases. Keep in mind that while a few exceptions exist (MOVW to copy a register pair and indirect addressing via X, Y, Z pointers), instructions on an 8 bit architecture generally only affect 8 bit values.

  • A 16 bit variable is byte-wise read in the main function and updated in an ISR.
  • A 32 bit variable is read, modified and subsequently stored back in either main function or ISR while the other routine could try to access it.
  • The execution of a block of code is time-critical (bitbanging I/O, disabling JTAG).

A basic example for the first case is given in the AVR libc documentation:

#include <cinttypes> 
#include...