Use of FreeRTOS in Teaching Real-time Embedded Systems Design Course

Nannan He; Han-Way Huang

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Conference: 2014 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Indianapolis, Indiana
Publication Date: June 15, 2014
Start Date: June 15, 2014
End Date: June 18, 2014
ISSN: 2153-5965
Conference Session: Laboratory Applications of Computers
Tagged Division: Computers in Education
Page Count: 11
Page Numbers: 24.1307.1 - 24.1307.11
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--23240
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/23240
Download Count: 4702

Paper Authors

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Nannan He Minnesota State University, Mankato

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Nannan He received the Ph.D. in computer engineering from Virginia Tech. From 2012 to present she is an Assistant Professor at the ECET department in Minnesota State University at Mankato. Her teaching and research interests are in safety-critical embedded software, real-time embedded systems, and software verification. She is an IEEE member and reviewers for many conferences and journals in EDA field.

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Han-Way Huang Minnesota State University, Mankato

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Ph.D. in computer engineering from Iowa State University
Professor of ECET Department of Minnesota State University, Mankato

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Abstract

Use of FreeRTOS in Teaching Real-time Embedded Systems Design CourseAbstractThis paper presents our experience on teaching the course of “Real-time Embedded SystemsDesign” using the free, open source Real-time Operating System (RTOS) called FreeRTOS.It introduces the objectives, student outcomes and instruction approach employed in this course.The focus is to describe the details of utilizing FreeRTOS as a case study of RTOS and its usagein the lab sessions from exercises preparation, lab equipment setup and implementation.This real-time embedded systems design course is for senior and graduate electrical andcomputer engineering major students. It focuses on teaching students real-time systems designand applications from the practitioner’s point of view, as compared with many graduate-levelreal-time computing courses which target at the research and theoretical topics. This course notonly includes RTOS relevant contents, such as multi-task scheduling, system services, andresource policies; but also covers some application issues for developing real-time systems, suchas microcontroller hardware, requirement analysis, performance analysis and verification. Aftertaking this course, students are expected to demonstrate the ability of correctly defining anddesigning real-time systems, and the ability of basic real-time application development. Activelearning and hands-on learning are the fundamental teaching approaches applied to this real-timesystems design course.FreeRTOS is an open source real-time kernel/scheduler designed to be small enough to run on amicrocontroller. It provides the real time scheduling functionality, inter-task communication,timing analysis and synchronization primitives for teaching RTOS. It also offers the richexample projects as the bases for developing embedded real-time systems. FreeRTOS supports alarge number of underlying microcontroller architectures including advanced ARM CortexTM-Mx series, and has become the standard RTOS for microcontrollers. For instance, Atmel Studio(v6.1), a free embedded development tool from Atmel, has included FreeRTOS into its AtmelSoftware Framework as one of software libraries. The FreeRTOS kernel is responsible for timingand provides the time-related APIs. This allows the structure of the application code to besimpler. As a result, complex embedded real-time applications can be efficiently built to meettheir real-time processing deadlines on top of FreeRTOS. In this course, FreeRTOS is applied toconducting experiments with multitask scheduling algorithms and real-time interfacing withmicrocontrollers for all our lab sessions and course projects. The lab assignment covers fivebasic RTOS components: Task management, Queue management, Interrupt management,Resource management and Memory management. Each component includes three to eightexercises. Our experiences demonstrate that FreeRTOS is a richly featured, cost efficient andeasy to use software platform for teaching real-time systems design and developing themicrocontroller-based embedded real-time applications.

Citation
Format

He, N., & Huang, H. (2014, June), Use of FreeRTOS in Teaching Real-time Embedded Systems Design Course Paper presented at 2014 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Indianapolis, Indiana. 10.18260/1-2--23240

TY  - CPAPER
AB  -            Use of FreeRTOS in Teaching Real-time Embedded Systems                                Design CourseAbstractThis paper presents our experience on teaching the course of “Real-time Embedded SystemsDesign” using the free, open source Real-time Operating System (RTOS) called FreeRTOS.It introduces the objectives, student outcomes and instruction approach employed in this course.The focus is to describe the details of utilizing FreeRTOS as a case study of RTOS and its usagein the lab sessions from exercises preparation, lab equipment setup and implementation.This real-time embedded systems design course is for senior and graduate electrical andcomputer engineering major students. It focuses on teaching students real-time systems designand applications from the practitioner’s point of view, as compared with many graduate-levelreal-time computing courses which target at the research and theoretical topics. This course notonly includes RTOS relevant contents, such as multi-task scheduling, system services, andresource policies; but also covers some application issues for developing real-time systems, suchas microcontroller hardware, requirement analysis, performance analysis and verification. Aftertaking this course, students are expected to demonstrate the ability of correctly defining anddesigning real-time systems, and the ability of basic real-time application development. Activelearning and hands-on learning are the fundamental teaching approaches applied to this real-timesystems design course.FreeRTOS is an open source real-time kernel/scheduler designed to be small enough to run on amicrocontroller. It provides the real time scheduling functionality, inter-task communication,timing analysis and synchronization primitives for teaching RTOS. It also offers the richexample projects as the bases for developing embedded real-time systems. FreeRTOS supports alarge number of underlying microcontroller architectures including advanced ARM CortexTM-Mx series, and has become the standard RTOS for microcontrollers. For instance, Atmel Studio(v6.1), a free embedded development tool from Atmel, has included FreeRTOS into its AtmelSoftware Framework as one of software libraries. The FreeRTOS kernel is responsible for timingand provides the time-related APIs. This allows the structure of the application code to besimpler. As a result, complex embedded real-time applications can be efficiently built to meettheir real-time processing deadlines on top of FreeRTOS. In this course, FreeRTOS is applied toconducting experiments with multitask scheduling algorithms and real-time interfacing withmicrocontrollers for all our lab sessions and course projects. The lab assignment covers fivebasic RTOS components: Task management, Queue management, Interrupt management,Resource management and Memory management. Each component includes three to eightexercises. Our experiences demonstrate that FreeRTOS is a richly featured, cost efficient andeasy to use software platform for teaching real-time systems design and developing themicrocontroller-based embedded real-time applications.
AU  - Nannan He
AU  - Han-Way Huang
CY  - Indianapolis, Indiana
DA  - 2014/06/15
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Use of FreeRTOS in Teaching Real-time Embedded Systems Design Course
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/23240
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--23240
ER  -