The beat or heartbeat in CCA provides the base timing of a CCA component circuit. It is used by all timing-based Processing Strategies as potential trigger for execution.
Typically, you create a periodic beat per circuit, which is configured to have a certain timing. An example to create a beat that beats every 10 ms:
BeatPtr heartbeat = PeriodicBeat::create(10); // every 10 milliseconds
CCA components timing-based Processing Strategies need to be assigned to this beat and configure with their processing strategy, if they are executed every beat, or every n-th beat:
BeatPtr heartbeat = PeriodicBeat::create(10); // every 10 milliseconds
...
ComponentPtr myComponent1 = MyComponent::create("foo"));
myComponent1.setProcessingStrategy(Timed::samplerate(1)); // executed every 10 ms
...
ComponentPtr myComponent2 = MyComponent::create("bar"));
myComponent2.setProcessingStrategy(Timed::samplerate(3)); // executed every 30 ms
...
heartbeat->registerReceiver(myComponent1):
heartbeat->registerReceiver(myComponent2):