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

We've covered quite a few concepts in this chapter in relation to super loops and tasks. At this point, you should have a good understanding of how super loops can be combined with interrupts and DMA to provide parallel processing to keep a system responsive, without the use of an RTOS. We introduced task-based architectures at a theoretical level and the two main types of scheduling you'll encounter when using FreeRTOS (round-robin and preemptive). You also had a very brief glimpse at how a preemptive scheduler schedules tasks of different priorities. All of these concepts are important to grasp, so feel free to refer back to these simplistic examples as we move forward and discuss more advanced topics.

In the next chapter, you'll be introduced to the various inter-task communication mechanisms that will cause context switches like the ones covered in this...