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

Proprietary IDEs

Once the norm for cross-compiling applications for MCUs, paid proprietary IDEs are starting to be outnumbered by free, open source solutions. However, the mere existence of free options doesn't immediately render paid options obsolete. The selling point of proprietary IDEs is that they provide the widest range of device support and require the least amount of attention from the developer.

Designed to work out of the box, the paid professional-grade solutions' claim to fame is saving developers time. These time savings will typically come in three main forms: unified environments for setting up an MCU, unified debugging environments, and vendor-supplied middleware, common across multiple MCU vendors.

Getting an MCU up and running is easier now than it ever has been, but once a project gets advanced enough that it starts defining specific memory regions...