Book Image

Hands-On RTOS with Microcontrollers

By : Brian Amos
Book Image

Hands-On RTOS with Microcontrollers

By: Brian Amos

Overview of this book

A real-time operating system (RTOS) is used to develop systems that respond to events within strict timelines. Real-time embedded systems have applications in various industries, from automotive and aerospace through to laboratory test equipment and consumer electronics. These systems provide consistent and reliable timing and are designed to run without intervention for years. This microcontrollers book starts by introducing you to the concept of RTOS and compares some other alternative methods for achieving real-time performance. Once you've understood the fundamentals, such as tasks, queues, mutexes, and semaphores, you'll learn what to look for when selecting a microcontroller and development environment. By working through examples that use an STM32F7 Nucleo board, the STM32CubeIDE, and SEGGER debug tools, including SEGGER J-Link, Ozone, and SystemView, you'll gain an understanding of preemptive scheduling policies and task communication. The book will then help you develop highly efficient low-level drivers and analyze their real-time performance and CPU utilization. Finally, you'll cover tips for troubleshooting and be able to take your new-found skills to the next level. By the end of this book, you'll have built on your embedded system skills and will be able to create real-time systems using microcontrollers and FreeRTOS.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction and RTOS Concepts
5
Section 2: Toolchain Setup
9
Section 3: RTOS Application Examples
13
Section 4: Advanced RTOS Techniques

Summary

In this chapter, we've covered the different ways of defining tasks and how to start the FreeRTOS scheduler. Along the way, we covered some more examples of using Ozone, SystemView, and STM32CubeIDE (or any Eclipse CDT-based IDE). All of this information was used to create a live demo that tied all of the RTOS concepts regarding task creation with the mechanics of actually loading and analyzing code running on embedded hardware. There were also some suggestions on how not to monitor for events (polling).

In the next chapter, we'll introduce what you should be using for event monitoring. Multiple ways of implementing inter-task signaling and synchronization will be covered all through examples. There's going to be LOTS of code and a bunch of hands-on analysis using the Nucleo board.