[sdiy] RTOS (was Re: sine wave floating point conversion issue)

[Matthew Smith]

Quoth Tom Wiltshire at 26/02/12 07:53...
> What advantages do you find with a full RTOS, Matthew?

To give a bit of background, I have been developing (mostly on paper,) a 
few microcontroller-based systems, for various purposes, and using 
different families of devices from multiple vendors.

In order to avoid continually re-inventing the wheel, I have started 
building a toolkit of code to write to a specific (external) DAC, 
display stuff on an LCD, interpret data from a rotary encoder, etcetera, 
etcetera. The idea is to create a hardware abstraction layer (HAL) for 
each family, so that the higher level toolkit can talk to a consistent 
API, even if I were to port from, say, AVR, to MSP430, to Kinetis ARM 
Cortex M4.

Writing a scheduler for each of these would mean having to do so for 
each family, due to the ways different interrupts are implemented both 
in the devices themselves, and the different toolchains.

FreeRTOS appears to take care of both HAL and scheduler - someone's 
already done the dirty work. I can just get on and build my toolkit, 
knowing that I've got a consistent API to work with, and a proven 
scheduler to boot.

I can then take the ADSR/LFO code I'm developing on an ATMega128 (the 
last thing I'm doing with AVR, as I'm dumping Atmel in favour of 
Freescale) and shove it, as a module, straight into a Kinetis project.

So, I guess you could say that, for me, it's about flexibility and 
cutting development time over a number of designs.

-- 
Matthew Smith

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