Hands-On RTOS with Microcontrollers

The importance of MCU selection

After reading the title of this section, you might be asking yourself:

"Hey! I thought this was a book about how to program a microcontroller using an RTOS—what's all this about MCU selection? I'm a software developer!"

FreeRTOS is almost exclusively targeted at MCUs. It is primarily a scheduling kernel with a stable API, which makes it very well-suited to extremely low-level design. Unlike a full-blown CPU system with practically unlimited virtual addressing space and more clock cycles than you know what to do with, you're going to be working with a resource-constrained system. If you're developing firmware on this type of system, it means you're going to be much closer to the hardware than if you were writing ...