Course

Real-Time Embedded Systems Programming, Introduction

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A real-time embedded system is designed to monitor and respond to external environments within a time deadline. A wide variety of devices that you see on the market today fall into this category - personal health and fitness trackers, smart thermostats, home security systems, and smart video cameras, to name a few. These systems interact with the environment using a variety of hardware and software interfaces. The embedded software manages these interfaces and makes sure that the tasks are accomplished within tight timing constraints. The Real Time Operating System (RTOS) on these devices is responsible for scheduling independent tasks and managing processes. This introductory course provides a foundation in the features and programming models of real-time embedded systems with hands-on learning.

The course introduces the fundamentals of real-time scheduling and resource management protocols that are essential in designing and building commercial products and covers the use of RTOS to effectively design tasks and device drivers to meet real-time requirements. You'll learn about important topics in real-time systems, such as priority-based real time scheduling, interrupt handling, using timers, and detecting and preventing deadlocks. The course will also discuss multi-threading, cooperative versus preemptive multi-tasking and inter-process communications, focusing on programming in FreeRTOS and understanding internals such as schedulers and idle tasks.

You'll design and code a real-time embedded systems project in C language on an open source FreeRTOS emulator. Upon completion of the course, you'll understand real-time embedded systems programming and the interactions of hardware, software, and the OS in such systems.

Topics include:

Introduction to real-time embedded systems: attributes and examples

Object-oriented view of RT embedded systems

Layered architecture of RT embedded system: hardware to applications

RTOS concepts

FreeRTOS and implementation

Introduction to other RTOS-es and layers

Design projects

Skills Needed: A strong background in C programming and an understanding of embedded system architecture.