DirectTask and nested interrupts

One problem with the old rocketometer code is that the sensor readout and SD card writing code were in the same thread, meaning that when the SD card took its endless milliseconds to write the data, the sensors were not being read, leaving an irregular gap in the record. My brilliant idea was to read the sensors in a task at interrupt priority, effectively creating another thread. First effort was with the task manager I described below, which was a dismal failure.

For whatever reason, and perhaps the same reason (see below), the task was not able to read the sensors. I came up with a much simpler task manager with which I am getting incredible accuracy.

I call it the DirectTask manager. Its concept: Rather than using one match channel of the timer and a heap priority queue, we just use all three available match channels (there are four, but the zeroth channel resets the timer every 1 minute). This limits the flexibility enormously, but I only need two tasks. I set up one task to reschedule itself on a regular basis (5ms in my first test) and I use the other task to read the BMP sensor.

However, the sensor readout runs an I2C read, which itself is interrupt driven. The code does not currently support nested interrupts, which means all interrupts are delayed until the current one returns. The I2C state machine was interrupt drive, and its interrupts were getting delayed, including the one which makes the state machine stop waiting forever, so the state machine waited forever.

So, we put in an option to I2C to run without interrupts, instead using a busy loop to check the I2C interrupt status bit, then calling the same state machine driver. We weren't getting anything by being interrupt driven anyway, since we had to wait for the read to finish.

With that, the DirectTask manager worked fine. Maybe the heap task manager would have worked fine too, but this one is simpler.

It takes 641 microseconds to read the sensors. We could probably easily bump the read rate to 500Hz, and maybe to 1000Hz, but this doesn't count anything but reading the MPU and HighAcc sensors.