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

Comparing FreeRTOS and CMSIS-RTOS

There is a common misconception that there is an RTOS named CMSIS-RTOS. CMSIS-RTOS is actually just an API definition. Its implementation is largely a glue layer to the underlying RTOS, but where functional differences exist between the two, some glue code will be present to map functionality.

ARM developed CMSIS-RTOS with the same goal in mind as when CMSIS was developed: to add a consistent layer of abstraction that reduces vendor lock-in. The original CMSIS was meant to reduce Silicon vendor lock-in by providing uniform methods for middleware to access common Cortex-M functionality. It accomplished this goal – there are only a few variants of FreeRTOS ports for the thousands of Cortex-M-based MCUs it supports. Likewise, ARM is now attempting to reduce RTOS vendor lock-in by making the RTOS itself easier to change out – by providing...