Preface

This second-edition hands-on guide will provide you with the functional knowledge needed for using a real-time operating system (RTOS) in embedded systems, and in particular, systems that run on a microcontroller unit (MCU). If you’re interested in learning how to implement such systems through hands-on examples and using actual hardware, you’re in the right place!

This book focuses on FreeRTOS, a market-leading and open-source RTOS. Its features and application are brought to life with more than 25 example-programs.

The book explains how FreeRTOS works, including its primary features and APIs. The explanations are accompanied by example programs, and they are described line-by-line. The book also shows how FreeRTOS can be used to create real-world systems, such as drivers for MCU peripherals.

The example programs run on an ST development board (dev-board), which can be purchased separately (STM32 Nucleo-F767ZI). A set of development tools is presented, and these tools are used when working with the example programs. The tools include the IDE STM32CubeIDE and SEGGER’s Ozone and SystemView debugging tools. SystemView is especially valuable for its FreeRTOS-related features, including its graphical display of FreeRTOS’s multi-tasking.

You will gain hands-on experience with FreeRTOS and the development tools. Using the dev-board and tools, you can run the example programs, analyze their behavior, and experiment with them by making modifications. Also, instructions are provided for installing FreeRTOS on the dev-board, so you can develop your own programs from scratch.

Engineers who are already familiar with such dev-boards and tools may want to just read the book and not use the dev-board and tools. The book shows the example-programs’ code, and tool use is shown in the figures.