AsyncArduino is a header file I wrote for a school project involving Zumo robots.
Arduino has a extreme disability: It only has one microcontroller.
This means that we cannot do many things; many things at once. For instance, if I would like to operate many sensors at once, I will not be able to do it with traditional code, as reading from sensors usually (actually, most of the time) will require the use of some sort of delay(), which can be a great disadvantage in Zumo battle rings.
Hence, I've developed this header file that can be used in all projects made for the Arduino; not just for Zumo fighting things. This header file allows functions to run like as if they are in parallel; all within a single microcontroller.
To achieve this, we use a programming paradigm called Asynchronous, and is based on async found in Python. This is a Python tutorial on async, which may help you understand what I am trying to achieve here.
This header file is built to be as simple as possible.
To use Async, you first need to declare an object of Async somewhere where the object exists for the entire duration of you wanting to use Async:
Async<unsigned long(*)(unsigned long, unsigned long)> async;Preferably, somewhere in your global variables section of the Arduino, or a shared structure passed around.
All functions used within Async must comply with the following template:
unsigned long a_function(unsigned long step, unsigned long id) {
return 0; //the number here is the amount of time you want to delay in microseconds
}All functions used within Async must then be added into the event loop as follows, in order for it to be executed:
async.add(function<unsigned long(*)(unsigned long, unsigned long)>(a_function));Async can then be started using:
async.run_until_complete();A more complete usage guide can be found here
Please refer to this blog post I have made to understand how to comprehensively use Async.