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

Deciding which API to use

Deciding which API to use is largely based on where you'd like your code to be portable to and what experience various team members have. For example, if you're interested in being able to try out different Cortex-M RTOS vendors, CMSIS-RTOS is a natural choice. It will allow different operating systems to be brought in without changing the application-level code.

Similarly, if your application code needs to be capable of running both in a Linux environment on a fully featured CPU as well as on an MCU, the FreeRTOS POSIX implementation would make a lot of sense.

Since both of these APIs are layered on top of the native FreeRTOS API, you'll still be able to use any FreeRTOS-specific functionality that is required. The following sections should provide some points for consideration and help you decide when each API should be chosen. As usual...