Interrupts and Power Management

Abstract

An embedded system either responds to an asynchronous request or performs an operation in a periodic manner most of the times. One approach to handle such requests is letting the CPU wait in an infinite loop in idle mode till an asynchronous request comes or event period has been reached. A better approach for such operations is the interrupt usage. This method handles the problem such that the CPU performs its usual (or synchronous) operation and handles asynchronous or periodic operations when requested. Therefore, we will start with explaining the interrupt concept in embedded systems first in this chapter. Then, we will focus on setting up and usage of interrupts in the STM32F4 microcontroller. The recent trend in embedded systems is consuming as less power as possible. Hence, the system deployed to a remote location can run on battery or by its own energy harvesting module. Therefore, we will also consider power management besides interrupt concepts in this chapter. As the end of the chapter application, we will add interrupt and power management operations to the robot vacuum cleaner developed throughout the book.