You're reading from Hands-On RTOS with Microcontrollers Create high-performance, real-time embedded systems using FreeRTOS, STM32 MCUs, and SEGGER debug tools

Product type Paperback

Published in Sep 2025

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781803237725

Length 570 pages

Edition 2nd Edition

Languages

Concepts

Operating Systems

Authors (2):

Jim Yuill

Penn Linder

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Table of Contents (27) Chapters

Preface

1. Part 1: Introduction to RTOSes, the Dev-Board, and Tools

2. Introducing Real-Time Systems FREE CHAPTER

3. Introducing the Development Board

4. Introducing the Development-Tools

5. Understanding Super-Loops

6. Implementing the Super-Loop

7. Part 2: The FreeRTOS Scheduler, Tasks, and Primary APIs

8. Understanding RTOS Tasks

9. Running the FreeRTOS Scheduler

10. Protecting Data and Synchronizing Tasks

11. Intertask Communication

12. Part 3: Using FreeRTOS to Build Systems

13. Drivers and ISRs

14. More Efficient Drivers and ISRs

15. Sharing Hardware Peripherals among Tasks

16. Creating Loose Coupling with Queues

17. Part 4: System Design and Troubleshooting

18. FreeRTOS Memory Management

19. Multi-Processor and Multi-Core Systems

20. Troubleshooting Tips and Next Steps

21. Part 5: Reference Information and FreeRTOS Installation

22. Other Books You May Enjoy

23. Index

Appendix A: Tools Quick-Reference

1. Appendix B: Reference Information

2. Appendix C: Creating FreeRTOS Projects, and Installing FreeRTOS

Software timers

This section describes software timers, and it presents an example-program that uses software timers. Also, guidelines are presented for using software timers.

Understanding software timers

Just like the name states, software timers are timers that are implemented with software. In MCUs, it is extremely common to have many different hardware-peripheral timers available. These are often high resolution and have many different modes and features that are used to offload work from the CPU. However, there are two downsides to hardware timers:

Since hardware timers are part of the MCU, you’ll need to create an abstraction above them to prevent your code from becoming tightly coupled to the underlying MCU hardware. Different MCUs will have slightly different implementations for timers. Because of this, it is easy for code to become dependent on the underlying hardware.
Hardware timers will generally take more development time to set-up than...