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

Technical requirements

To complete the hands-on exercises in this chapter, you will require the following:

  • Nucleo F767 development board
  • Micro USB cable
  • ST/Atollic STM32CubeIDE and its source code (the instructions for this can be found in Chapter 5, Selecting an IDE Setting Up Our IDE)
  • SEGGER JLink, Ozone, and SystemView (Chapter 6, Debugging Tools for Real-Time Systems)

The easiest way to build the examples in this chapter is to build all Eclipse configurations at once, and then load and view them using Ozone. To do this, follow these steps:

  1. In STM32CubeIDE, right-click on the project.
  2. Select Build.
  3. Select Build All. All the examples will be built into their own named subdirectory (this may take a while).
  4. In Ozone, you can now quickly load each <exampleName>.elf file. See Chapter 6, Debugging Tools for Real-Time Systems, for instructions on how to do this...