An Introduction to Microcontrollers, Part 5 Run Programs in Eight MCUs

摘要

Experimenters and engineers often think, "I wish I had a second microcontroller for this project." Take heart, one Propeller chip provides eight MCUs (Photo A), However, our examples have used only one. Let's suppose a circuit must perform three actions at different times: Action A every 1.2 seconds, Action B every 0.482 seconds, and Action C every 3.37 seconds. You might need three independent timers; one for each action. Even when an MCU includes many timers, writing code to handle them can present a challenge. When you use a Propeller chip, you could assign three MCUs to handle the three tasks. We call these stand-alone MCUs "cogs," and so far, our example programs have used only one cog, Cog 0. Objects we copied from the OBEX might have used more cogs, though. We just don't realize it unless we carefully examine their code.