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 why having access to excellent debugging tools is important. The exact tools we'll be using to analyze system behavior (SEGGER Ozone and SystemView) have been introduced. You've also been guided through how to get these tools set up for use with future projects. Toward the end, we touched on a few other tools that won't be covered in this book just to raise awareness of them.

Now that we've covered MCU and IDE selection, and we have all of our tooling squared away, we have enough background to get into the real meat of RTOS application development.

Using this toolset will help you gain an in-depth understanding of RTOS behavior and programming as we dive into working examples in the upcoming chapters. You'll also be able to use this same tooling to create high-performing, custom real-time applications in the...