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

Chapter 2

  1. Both of the above options.
  2. False.
  3. Complex super loops tend to have a large amount of variability in how long it takes them to execute the loop. This can lead to poor determinism in the system, since there is no easy way to provide a means for higher-priority work to take precedence over everything else happening in the loop.
  4. Interrupts and DMA can both be used to improve the response of super loops to external events. They allow hardware peripherals to be serviced without waiting to be polled during a super-loop cycle.
  5. There is only one super loop being run in the system. It shares the system stack. Tasks, however, each receive their own dedicated stack. Each task receives a priority, unlike a superloop, which has no inherent concept of prioritization.
  6. Prioritization.
  7. A preemptive scheduler attempts to ensure that the task with the highest priority is always the one...