Quantum Frameowrk™-nano (QF-nano) is a reusable event-driven application framework for executing concurrent state machines specifically designed for low-end 8- and 16-bit MCUs. The use of QF-nano generally simplifies the design of event-driven software by allowing the application to be divided into multiple active objects that the framework manages. Active objects in QF-nano are encapsulated tasks (each embedding a state machine and an event queue) that communicate with one another asynchronously by sending and receiving events. Within an active object, events are processed sequentially in a run-to-completion (RTC) fashion, while QF-nano encapsulates all the details of thread-safe event exchange and queuing.
Most of QF™-nano is written in portable ANSI-C, with microprocessor-specific and compiler-specific code kept to a minimum for ease of portability. QF-nano is designed to work with Quantum Event Processor (QEP) and either the simple cooperative kernel or fully preemptive kernel called QK-nano. The framework is very compact, typically taking up about 1-2KB of code and data (including the QEP-nano Hierarchical Event Processor). QF is described in Chapter 12 of the book Practical UML Statecharts in C/C++, Second Edition, Newnes 2008.
Please refer to the QP-nano Tutorial for information on implementing event-driven applications with the QF real-time framework and other components of the QP-nano event-driven platform.
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