Hands-On RTOS with Microcontrollers

Build a strong foundation in designing and implementing real-time systems with the help of practical examples

Key Features

• Get up and running with the fundamentals of RTOS and apply them on STM32
• Enhance your programming skills to design and build real-world embedded systems
• Get to grips with advanced techniques for implementing embedded systems

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

• Understand when to use an RTOS for a project
• Explore RTOS concepts such as tasks, mutexes, semaphores, and queues
• Discover different microcontroller units (MCUs) and choose the best one for your project
• Evaluate and select the best IDE and middleware stack for your project
• Use professional-grade tools for analyzing and debugging your application
• Get FreeRTOS-based applications up and running on an STM32 board

Who this book is for

This book is for embedded engineers, students, or anyone interested in learning the complete RTOS feature set with embedded devices. A basic understanding of the C programming language and embedded systems or microcontrollers will be helpful.

Table of Contents

1. Introducing Real-Time Systems
2. Understanding RTOS Tasks
3. Task Signaling and Communication Mechanisms
4. Selecting the Right MCU
5. Selecting an IDE
6. Debugging Tools for Real-Time Systems
7. The FreeRTOS Scheduler
8. Protecting Data and Synchronizing Tasks
9. Intertask Communication
10. Drivers and ISRs
11. Sharing Hardware Peripherals across Tasks
12. Tips for Creating a Well-Abstracted Architecture
13. Creating Loose Coupling with Queues
14. Choosing an RTOS API
15. FreeRTOS Memory Management
16. Multi-Processor and Multi-Core Systems
17. Troubleshooting Tips and Next Steps

Brian Amos is an embedded system engineer who has been programming with FreeRTOS since 2012. He is currently a senior firmware engineer in the telecom industry creating embedded systems used in ground stations for satellite communication. In the past, he led a team of engineers creating a flexible architecture to rapidly develop high-precision laboratory test equipment. Prior to this, he worked with early mesh networked energy harvesting sensors used to help predict when industrial machinery needed maintenance.