State Machine Shortcuts

Posted 27 Jun 2003 at 14:00 UTC by steve

Finite state machine (FSM) programming languages like IsoMAX are becoming quite popular with robot builders. Because most of us grew up working with structured, procedural code, the occasional how-to article can be helpful. Michael Kreiman has written an embedded.com article that describes a subset of UML statechart notation that leads to relatively simple code implementations for embedded applications. Kreiman's model takes into account two types of FSMs, event-based state machines and periodic state machines. Sample source code in C is provided for the example program described in the article.

In case anyone is interested, posted 1 Jul 2003 at 19:43 UTC by earlwb » (Master)

Although I like the www.newmicros.com ISOPOD a lot, I ran into this tidbit, that some of you might find interesting.

http://www.iar.com/Products/VS/

IAR just happens to have visualState a graphical design tool for generating optimized C++ code using a State machine system.

UML is for Wimps, posted 2 Jul 2003 at 03:50 UTC by The Swirling Brain » (Master)

When I worked at Samsung, it seemed that all we ever did was UML, state machines, and documentation. We spent months with rational rose drawing cute UML state machine art and writing ISO docs and wasting months of good man hours on boring and seemingly non-productive stuff like that. Even though it probably did help us with writing our program a bit, I'm still hard headed enough to think that UML and state machines are overrated and overhyped. I especially hate documentation. I guess I still have the "dang, just let me code it" attitude hard head. Yeah, yeah, design and document CYA, but I still get a big thrill out of just coding at home without having to design or document. I guess that's why state machine languages have a stigma with me. It just seems like UML or documentation all over again that I hate so much so I'm just a little paranoid even getting into it.

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