I’ve just completed a 4-day training course on embedded systems development using FreeRTOS. I had a few days to prepare the training material for it and through the course of the training, I learned the virtues of writing on an RTOS platform.
Some of my trainees were from the ‘old skool’ of embedded development and are used to the traditional paradigm of using a state machine loop with a bunch of interrupt service routines to make things work.
That’s all fine and dandy except that once you discover the power of coding on an RTOS platform, it blows your mind. And to thoroughly exploit the power of an RTOS, you need to do a paradigm shift and move up one level of abstraction in application design.
A typical embedded developer would be in control of everything in a chip, which puts all the responsibility and power in the hands of the developer. Every little thing needed to be taken care of in order to avoid problems.
But with an RTOS, one moves up the ladder and thinks merely in terms of tasks, priorities and synchronisation. That’s it! (Blows your mind)
As part of AESTE’s platform development, I had FreeRTOS ported to our AEMB platform. However, I still had never actually done any RTOS platform development before this. Through the course of developing the training material, I was forced to jump in head-first into FreeRTOS.
It was an educational experience and I now understand the guts of FreeRTOS inside out. As a result, I can appreciate all the complexity that went into and and have now learned why it is a useful tool to have in our arsenal. We will continue to devote more resources to developing it into a full fledged product.
I will try to set things down in a structured way and write a tutorial into getting a basic FreeRTOS application working in 5-minutes.
Technical Intercourse 