Real Time Operating Systems with Brian Amos

Welcome, Brian Amos, author of Hands-on RTOS with Microcontrollers

• Learned about the book from past guest Phillip Johnston. Also talked to Alvaro Prieto (Unnamed RE) about FreeRTOS.
• "How do I RTOS?"
• When do you want to use a Real Time Operating System (RTOS)?
  • Assume you can from a state machine
  • User interface you'll want it
  • Communication capability (IoT devices)
• Differentiating OS vs RTOS
• Amazon acquired FreeRTOS in 2017
• FreeRTOS is a bottom up methodology
• It's possible to make a completely statically allocated memory for a project (no heap, no malloc, etc)
• Simple examples around reading a sensor, pump status, screen, internet
• System level design decisions
• Interrupt Service Routine (ISR)
• Ticks are important
• How did Brian get into this?
• Brian was working on a product that had a
  • Telos module
  • MSP430
  • TinyOS
  • nesC?
• James Grenning's book on TDD for embedded
• Modern micros can do a lot in parallel, especially using hardware like DMA
• Troubleshooting an RTOS
  • SEGGER Ozone (debugger)
  • SystemView
  • Percipio Tracealyzer
• Many of the graphics in the book are available on Brian's github page as CC by SA licensing
• Page 48 graphic
• Brian taunts us on Page 98 showing lots of STM32 parts in stock...
• NucleoF7 board used in examples (unsurprisingly...out of stock)
• There's an onboard debugger that you can reprogram to Segger
• Going through exercises
• Working with HALs
• Logic analyzer for troubleshooting
• Embedded Linux
• Still goes bck to superloop
• Find Brian on:
  • LinkedIn
  • GitHub
  • Amazon book