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

The IDE selection criteria

The decision to select an IDE can take place at many different levels of an organization. A single engineer may be using the IDE for just one project. In this case, they're likely to simply select whatever they're familiar with or whatever happens to ship with the microcontroller unit (MCU) for that project. At the other end of the spectrum, an entire department could be integrating the IDE into their development workflow. In this case, the decision could affect dozens of engineers and address multiple target platforms for years down the road.

Some engineers prefer no IDE at all—instead, they'll pull together their favourite text editor and a command-line compiler or linker (such as GCC or Clang), handcraft some makefiles, and set off with coding. This is a perfectly valid approach, too—it will result in a great amount of...