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Products and Solutions in Embedded Computing and Interface like USB, I2C, SPI and CAN. Leading provider of embedded systems development tools for engineers all over the world.

Total Phase - Tools for Embedded Systems

Types of Products and Solutions Include Protocol Analyzers - Capture, display, search, and filter I2C, SPI, or USB in real time. Host Adapters, CAN Interfaces and various tools over the entire life cycle of any embedded system.

SPI Development Kit - Total Phase

• Exercise target devices on an SPI bus as a master device.
• Simulate an SPI master or slave device.
• Program and verify SPI-based Flash devices.
• Passively monitor an SPI bus in real-time with bit-level timing down to 20 ns.

Total Phase: Tips and Tools for USB, I2C, and SPI

WinAVR (pronounced "whenever") is a suite of executable, open source software development tools for the Atmel AVR series of RISC microprocessors hosted on the Windows platform. It includes the GNU GCC compiler for C and C++.

WinAVR - OSS for Atmel AVR RISC

WinAVR contains all the tools for developing on the AVR. This includes avr-gcc (compiler), avrdude (programmer), avr-gdb (debugger), and more!

You can try WinAVR out with Portable WinAVR, a version that doesn't require an install.

AVRFreaks.net - Discussion, Links, Tools, Datasheets.

Software tools for embedded systems, Like C/C++ compilers and debuggers, State machine tools, RTOS, TCP/IP and USB stacks; for 8, 16, and 32-bit microcontrollers. Helps in developing professional products in the areas of industrial automation, medical devices and automotive products.

IAR Systems - Embedded Systems Tools

IAR Systems provides completely integrated kits for development of embedded applications based on ARM, 8051, ColdFire, R8C/M16C/M32C and AVR32.

Development kits from IAR Systems

TNKernel performs a preemptive priority-based scheduling and a round-robin scheduling for the tasks with identical priority. The current version of TNKernel includes semaphores, mutexes, data queues, event flags and fixed-sized memory pools. The system functions calls in the interrupts are supported.

TNKernel - Fast RT Kernel for Embedded Systems

Ports -Microchip PIC24/dsPIC; Freescale HCS08; ARM Cortex-M3; Freescale ColdFire.

Things of Interest - TN NET TCP/IP stack; USB bulk firmware.

Single-Chip Microcontroller Real-Time Operating System. OSS, tiny preemptive Real-Time Operating System intended for use with Single-Chip Microcontrollers.

scmRTOS - Preemptive Multitasking OS

For - MSP430 (Texas Instruments); AVR (Atmel); Blackfin (Analog Devices); ARM7; FR (Fujitsu); Cortex-M3.

Some Features are

• Low Resource Requirements
• Preemptive multitasking
• Interprocess communication

Chris O'Byrne created YAVRTOS for understanding how RTOS can be built and how they Tick.

YAVRTOS - Yet Another Atmel AVR OS

What is a real-time operating system?

Processors are only actually only able to do one thing at a time, whereas we need them to do more than one thing at a time (e.g. update the display while checking for keypresses while reading the serial port). A real-time operating system (RTOS) provides facilities for achieving that.

What is a task?

A task does one of the things (e.g. update the display, check for keypresses, read the serial port) that the application needs done. The real-time operating system allows tasks to execute concurrently, while providing facilities for e.g. tasks to communicate with each other.

What is a tick?

The RTOS needs to be able to switch between tasks - they way it does this is by using a regular processor interrupt (e.g. one of the timer interrupts). Every such interrupt is called a "tick". These interrupts must be set up before the RTOS is started.

My Notes -

There are two things to learn from Chris, build something to completely learn a concept. This is a tough but thorough way of learning. The easier way is to learn from examples. Hacking and Reverse Engineering also good for students to digest methods exhaustively.

The way chris follows leads to things like innovation/improvement and inventions. That is A Better way. This phrase is probably attributed to hp, now called Agilent Technologies. The computing/printing division carries the hp brand name.

I had once serviced a DMM by hp(agilent) decades ago. It had something like a custom 8039. This was decades back. It was a 5-1/2 or more. It had a Watchdog built with CMOS 40xx chips. I never understood watchdogs then, they were not even called watchdogs.

Usable in all but the tightest micro-controller environments, The focus is on the tiny-to-small, deeply embedded environment. Fully scalable from tiny (8-bit) to moderate embedded (32-bit). Fully pre-emptible, fixed priority and round-robin scheduling.

NuttX RTOS - Scalable and Simple OS

Towards high degree of standards compliance. The primary governing standards are POSIX and ANSI standards. Free Service - Port NuttX to run on your custom hardware. Contact Gregory Nutt.

"FreeRTOS is the cross platform de facto standard for embedded microcontrollers."

FreeRTOS - Portable Open-Source Mini RT Kernel

Scaleable real time kernel designed specifically for small embedded systems.

Features Include

• Free RTOS kernel - preemptive, cooperative and hybrid configuration options.
• The SafeRTOS derivative product provides a high level of confidence in the code integrity.
• Official support for 23 architectures (counting ARM7 and ARM Cortex M3 as one architecture each).
• FreeRTOS-MPU supports the Cortex M3 Memory Protection Unit (MPU).
• Designed to be small, simple and easy to use.
• Free development tools (Cortex-M3, ARM7, MSP430, H8/S, AMD, AVR, x86 and 8051 ports).

AN1264 Integrating Microchip Libraries with a Real-Time Operating System

Microchip publish an application note showing how to integrate their libraries and stacks with FreeRTOS.

FreeRTOS implementation

TinyOS is an open-source operating system designed for wireless embedded sensor networks. It features a component-based architecture which enables rapid innovation and implementation while minimizing code size as required by the severe memory constraints inherent in sensor networks. TinyOS's component library includes network protocols, distributed services, sensor drivers, and data acquisition tools.

TinyOS for Wireless Embedded Sensor Networks

TinyOS has been ported to over a dozen platforms and numerous sensor boards. A wide community uses it in simulation to develop and test various algorithms and protocols.

• Official TinyOS Website
• Hardware Designs TinyOS

Nano-RK is a fully preemptive reservation-based real-time operating system (RTOS) from Carnegie Mellon University with multi-hop networking support for use in wireless sensor networks. Nano-RK currently runs on the FireFly Sensor Networking Platform as well as the MicaZ motes. It includes a light-weight embedded resource kernel (RK) with rich functionality and timing support using less than 2KB of RAM and 18KB of ROM.

Nano-RK - Wireless Sensor Networking RTOS

Features Include

• C GNU tool-chain
• Classical Preemptive Operating System Multitasking Abstractions
• Real-Time Priority Based Scheduling
• Built-in Fault Handling
• Energy Efficient Scheduling based on a-prior task-set knowledge
• Small Footprint (<2K RAM, 16K ROM, including link layer)
• SLIPstream (a simple gateway to IP network protocol and utility)
• Eclipse IDE allows for easy development