A novel multi-task software architecture applied in the intelligent insulin injector: An improved polling loop

摘要

It seems impossible for some kinds of microprocessors to run a perfect commercial or open source embedded OS, for their limited internal resources and computing power, As a result, it appears to be more difficult for them to deal with complex multiple tasks. In order to solve the design problem of multi-task software architecture in such processors, we proposed a novel method: improved polling loop, which was developed from the traditional polling loop, based on event-driven programming, running without any embedded OS, and successfully applied in the intelligent insulin injector^[1]. This method overcomes the problem that may exist in the traditional polling loop method when responding to more than two tasks coming sequentially, which is caused by the fixed scanning order once the codes is written down. Our method dynamically allocates tasks and implements them strictly in the order of a specified priority. It has the feature of dynamic time allocation, high system stability and convenience of making changes in system functionality in the future.