COURSE OBJECTIVES

To provide an understanding of the essentials of a real-time operating system. What are the advantages? What are the trade offs? Hands-on exercises provide you with the necessary practical experience to go ahead and use a real-time operating system with your own embedded system after successfully completing this training.  

SHORT COURSE INFO

Duration:

Three days

Format:

Delivered over the phone or Skype with instructor screen sharing - http://www.yuuguu.com

Language:

English - trainer has fluent German (as a first language)

Dates:   

On Demand

Time:      

TBD

Location:

At your office

Materials:

Handouts (book)

LPC1769 LPCXPresso Board by Embedded Artists or FreeRTOS NXP LPC1769 LPCXpresso Education-Evaluation Kit

USB Cable

Examples and solutions

Recording:

We do not permit recording and/or reuse of our coyrighted material

Concerning the registration please note, that for on-line trainings we don’t need to fill up a class room in order to cover our expenses for the room and the trip. We just need your written confirmation for the training to happen. It’s given to you as a private session if no other students sign up. In case you want to train multiple members of your team you might also want to query for an on-site training. Ask for multi-enrollment discounts.

Description

This 3-day training class uses hands-on exercises combined with instruction to illustrate the concepts of a real-time operating system. FreeRTOS will be used as an example. It is 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 on-the-job training. Don’t reinvent the wheel, but 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

• Basic familiarity with using a Windows system as an end user
• Familiarity with embedded C concepts and programming
• Ability to develop software using C syntax
• Ability to use 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 like software engineers, field engineers, (project) managers,…

Course Outline

Introduction

• FreeRTOS
  • overview, market position, ”free” in FreeRTOS, free software, open source, modified GPLv2, SW architecture, features, hard/firm/soft real-time, RTOS vs. Linux,…
• LPCXpresso
  • download, install, import example workspace
• Download FreeRTOS

Task Management

• tasks
  • what is a task?
  • crude loop periodic delay, task parameter, priorities, starvation,…
  • creation, states, priorities, idle task, deletion,…
  • TaskDelay, taskDelayUntil, polling vs. event driven, idle hook,…
• scheduling
  • determinism, multitasking, endless loop, cyclic executives, issues with interrupts, non-/preemptive, prioritized preemptive, rate monotonic, deadline, cooperative, hybrid

Queue Management

• What is a queue?
• creation, send, receive,…
• blocking on read/write,…
• With multiple tasks blocking who will run first?
• Large sets of data and queues.
• Indirect/Direct synchronous and asynchronous message passing.

Interrupt Management

• What is Interrupt vs. Polling?
• Hardware-, Software-interrupts.
• What if two interrupts arrive at the same time?
• What is reentrant code?
• What is an event?
• What kind of events do you know?
• What is a Semaphore and what can it be used for?
• What kind of Semaphores do you know?
• Signal/Wait pattern, state diagram, event states of binary semaphore…
• Counting semaphores
• Queues and ISRs
• deferred interrupt processing, interrupt handlers, XXXFromISR(), task with interrupt synchronization, efficient queue usage even from within an interrupt, interrupt nesting…

Resource Management

• concurrency, concurrent read/writes
• mutual exclusion, critical sections, suspending/locking the scheduler, mutexes, priority inversion, priority inheritance, deadlock, gate-keeper tasks, mutex vs. semaphore…

Memory Management

• memory types, fragmentation, memory exhaustion, memory allocation patterns, dynamic memory allocation in kernel
• memory allocation schemes,
  xPortGetFreeHeapSize(),…

Trouble Shooting

• spelunking, project planning, firmware standard, code review, binutils,…
• debugging by stopping - FreeRTOS Simulator - State viewer,…
• printf-stdarg.c, stack overflow and how to detect it
• heap overflow and how to detect it
• task statistics, run time statistics
• profiling, tracing
• common sources of error

FreeRTOS-MPU

• memory management
• user vs. privileged mode, access permission, defining MPU regions, linker, practical usage tips
• find out why a program failed

A customized version of this training is offered by FreeRTOS.

Remember, purchasing from FreeRTOS helps support the FreeRTOS project!