Reliable Embedded Systems

FreeRTOS in Theory and Practice

COURSE OBJECTIVES

To provide a practical knowledge and understanding of real-time kernel usage. What are the advantages? What are the trade-offs? Learn from an experienced trainer and take home a working knowledge of FreeRTOS and the ability to use it efectively in your own embedded development project.

Description

This 3-day training class uses hands-on exercises combined with instruction to illustrate the concepts of a real-time kernel. Examples using FreeRTOS form a series of practical coding exercises designed to bring you quickly up to speed. The concepts and commands necessary to make effective use of FreeRTOS are described through a combination of theory and ‘hands-on’ training. Learn from an experienced trainer and take home a working knowledge of FreeRTOS and the ability to use it effectively in your own embedded development project.

Prerequisites

• Familiarity with embedded C concepts and programming
• Ability to develop software using C syntax
• Ability to use basic embedded compiler and debug tools
• Basic knowledge of embedded processor development boards

Who should attend?

People with interest in or tasked with development of a resource constrained real-time system. For example - software engineers, field engineers, (project) managers.

Course Outline

• Introduction

  • FreeRTOS overview, market position, the "free" in FreeRTOS, understanding the FreeRTOS license, software architecture, features.
  • LPCXpresso IDE download and installation, importing an example workspace.

• Task Management

  • Tasks - Creation, states, priorities, the idle task, deletion.
  • Scheduling - Determinism, multitasking, endless loop, cyclic executives, issues with interrupts, non-preemptive, prioritized preemptive, rate monotonic, deadline, cooperative, hybrid.

• Queue Management

  • Creation, sending, receiving

• Interrupt Management

  • Deferred interrupt processing, interrupt handlers, interrupt safe functions, task with interrupt synchronization, efficient queue usage even from within an interrupt, interrupt nesting.

• Resource Management

  • Mutual exclusion, critical sections, suspending/locking the scheduler, mutexes, priority inversion, priority inheritance, deadlock, gatekeeper tasks.

• Memory Management

  • Resource constrained memory allocation schemes, determining the amount of free memory remaining.

• Trouble Shooting

• avoiding bugs and how to find those you did not avoid

• FreeRTOS-MPU

  • User vs. privileged mode, access permissions, defining MPU regions, linker configuration, practical usage tips.

• The FreeRTOS Download

  • Files and directories, demo apps, data types and coding style.