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

In this chapter, we covered many different aspects of synchronizing tasks and protecting shared data between tasks. We also covered semaphores, mutexes, and software timers. Then, we got our hands dirty by writing some code for each of these types and took a deep dive into analyzing the code's behavior using our Nucleo development board and SystemView.

Now, you have some tools at your disposal for solving synchronization problems, such as one task notifying another that an event has occurred (semaphores). This means you're able to safely share data between tasks by properly wrapping access in a mutex. You also know how to save a bit of RAM when performing simple operations, that is, by using software timers for small periodic operations, instead of dedicated tasks.

In the next chapter, we'll cover more crucial RTOS primitives that are used for inter-task...