Modern Embedded Systems Programming with QP Real-Time Event Frameworks

Many embedded developers say they use event-driven programming and state machines, yet their implementations often stop at message queues, event loops, and switch statements. Building true event-driven, hard-real-time systems requires a more advanced architectural foundation.

This workshop introduces the QP/C and QP/C++ Real-Time Event Frameworks—mature, lightweight, open-source frameworks that implement the Active Object (Actor) model and modern Hierarchical State Machines (UML statecharts). Participants will learn how this reusable architecture avoids shared-state concurrency, enables deterministic real-time behavior, and provides a scalable infrastructure for extensible embedded applications.

Through hands-on exercises on both a host PC and an STM32 NUCLEO board, attendees will explore the whole workflow of designing and implementing event-driven systems with QP. Topics include:

• Building and running QP examples to get started with the framework
• Implementing Hierarchical State Machines manually in C or C++
• Modeling UML statecharts graphically and generating code automatically
• Using time events to manage timing without blocking
• Executing Active Objects for hard real-time performance:
  • with QP’s built-in kernels (non-preemptive QV, preemptive non-blocking QK)
  • with traditional RTOSes (FreeRTOS, Zephyr)
  • with general-purpose OSes (embedded Linux, Windows)
• Event delivery mechanisms: direct posting and publish–subscribe
• Event memory management: immutable events and mutable events with user-defined parameters
• Software tracing for debugging, optimization, and monitoring
• Trace-based testing of event-driven QP applications

By the end of the workshop, participants will understand what it truly means to architect embedded software around events, state machines, and non-blocking concurrency—and how QP frameworks and the ecosystem of the surrounding tools make this approach practical, maintainable, and certifiable.