“Many, or even most, embedded programmers have no idea how ‘busy’ their CPU is. By ‘busy’, I mean what proportion of the available CPU cycles are being spent on doing useful work in the name of the target application, and how much time its idle waiting for something to do. On your desktop PC you’ve got some sort of CPU busy meter available through the Task Manager, Activity Monitor or System Monitor depending on which OS religion you follow. Wouldn’t it be useful to have something similar on that embedded device you’re working on? Far too many people think you need an OS for that kind of info, but it turns out it’s trivially easy to do…and it should be table stakes for getting started on a new design. In most embedded design patterns, you’ve got some sort of loop where the application sits, waiting for something to happen. That might be a timer expiring, an interrupt arriving or some other event. The general pattern looks something like this;”