Embedded microcontrollers are often programmed in plain C and lack support for multithreading and real-time scheduling. This can make it very cumbersome to implement multirate feedback control applications. We have developed the TINYREALTIME kernel for the Atmel ATmega8L AVR to show that it is feasible to use high-precision, deadline-based scheduling even in a tiny 8-bit processor with 1 KB of RAM. The kernel is demonstrated in a multirate control application, where six periodic real-time tasks (four control tasks and two pulse width modulation tasks) are used to control two ball-and-beam processes.
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