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

Chapter 13

  1. False. Queues create a definitive interface, which decouples components from one another.
  2. False. Any datatype can be placed into a queue.
  3. No, omitting the underlying formatting allows more flexibility for the producers of items to be queued. If the data isn't tied to a specific format, the format can be modified without affecting the queue or the consumer of data coming out of the queue.
  4. Possible answers include the following:
    • A queued item's lifetime doesn't need to be taken into consideration since a copy of it is made.
    • The queued item's scope doesn't need to be taken into account if it is passed by value into the queue.
    • If an item is passed by reference, a clear understanding of who owns the item is necessary, as well as who is responsible for freeing the resources associated with it.
  5. Possible answers include the following:
    • Latency...