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

Understanding shared peripherals

A hardware peripheral is similar to any other shared resource. When there is a single resource with multiple tasks that need access to the resource, some sort of arbitration needs to be created to guarantee orderly access to the resource across tasks. In the previous chapter, we focused on different ways of developing low-level peripheral drivers. Some guidance as to driver selection was provided and it was suggested that the appropriate interface the driver provides should be based on how the driver was to be used in the system (Chapter 10, Drivers and ISR's, under the section entitled Choosing a driver model).

Shared resources were covered conceptually in Chapter 3, Task Signaling and Communication Mechanisms.

There are many different examples of sharing peripherals in real-world applications. Communication peripherals such as SPI, I2C,...