After reading the title of this section, you might be asking yourself:
"Hey! I thought this was a book about how to program a microcontroller using an RTOS—what's all this about MCU selection? I'm a software developer!"
FreeRTOS is almost exclusively targeted at MCUs. It is primarily a scheduling kernel with a stable API, which makes it very well-suited to extremely low-level design. Unlike a full-blown CPU system with practically unlimited virtual addressing space and more clock cycles than you know what to do with, you're going to be working with a resource-constrained system. If you're developing firmware on this type of system, it means you're going to be much closer to the hardware than if you were writing software—which, in turn, means you're very likely going to be getting your hands very...