"Real-Time Applications with FreeRTOS"
"Real-Time Applications with FreeRTOS" is a comprehensive guide designed to equip engineers, developers, and embedded systems architects with a deep, practical understanding of both real-time concepts and advanced FreeRTOS techniques. The book begins with a clear exposition of real-time computing fundamentals, examining the critical differences between hard, firm, and soft real-time constraints and their influence on embedded system architectures. Readers gain important theoretical insights into scheduling algorithms, timing analysis, and RTOS selection criteria, laying a solid foundation for working with time-sensitive embedded solutions.
Building on this foundation, the book delves into the internal architecture of FreeRTOS, exploring its kernel design, task scheduling mechanisms, memory management strategies, and hardware abstraction layers. These chapters guide professionals through the intricacies of multi-threading, task management, and the implementation of advanced context switching, stack analysis, and low-power design. Inter-task synchronization and communication patterns are discussed in detail—including semaphores, mutexes, queues, event groups, and direct task notifications—providing clear strategies for managing concurrency and avoiding classical synchronization hazards like race conditions and deadlocks.
Rounding out the text are practical chapters on interrupt processing, time management, testing, profiling, and real-world deployment. Advanced application patterns, including event-driven architectures, robust networking, security, cloud integration, and over-the-air updates, are carefully covered alongside optimization, scaling, and diagnostics techniques. Drawing on industrial case studies from automotive, automation, and IoT domains, "Real-Time Applications with FreeRTOS" offers actionable guidance to build robust, scalable, and secure embedded systems using one of the world's most popular real-time operating systems.