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

Questions

As we conclude, here is a list of questions for you to test your knowledge of this chapter's material. You will find the answers in the Assessments section of the appendix:

  1. Queues decrease design flexibility since they create a rigid definition of data transfer that must be adhered to:
    • True
    • False
  2. Queues don't work well with other abstraction techniques; they must only contain simple data types:
    • True
    • False
  3. When using queues for commands acquired from a serial port, should the queue contain exactly the same information and formatting as the underlying serialized data stream? Why?
  4. Name a reason why passing data by value into queues is easier than passing by reference.
  5. Name one reason why it is necessary to carefully consider the depth of queues in a real-time embedded system?