A FreeRTOS Library for all Arduino AVR Devices (Uno, Leonardo, Mega, etc)
This is a fork of Richard Barry's freeRTOS, optimised for the Arduino AVR devices.
It has been created to provide access to FreeRTOS capabilities, with full compatibility to the Arduino environment. It does this by keeping hands off almost everything, and only touching the minimum of hardware to be successful.
Read the short blog post on Arduino FreeRTOS to get started. And there is another much older post on using FreeRTOS with AVR, which may be useful to read too. There are some further posts I've written on Hackster.IO, but they're essentially the same content.
The canonical source for information is the FreeRTOS Web Site. Within this site, the Getting Started page is very useful. This is the source for FreeRTOS usage (as distinct from installing and using this Arduino Library).
My other AVRfreeRTOS Sourceforge Repository or AVRfreeRTOS Github has plenty of examples, ranging from blink through to a synthesiser.
This library was the genesis of generalised support for the ATmega platform within FreeRTOS.
FreeRTOS has a multitude of configuration options, which can be specified from within the FreeRTOSConfig.h file. To keep commonality with all of the Arduino hardware options, some sensible defaults have been selected.
The AVR Watchdog Timer is used to generate 15ms time slices, but Tasks that finish before their allocated time will hand execution back to the Scheduler. This does not affect the use of any of the normal Timer functions in Arduino.
Time slices can be selected from 15ms up to 500ms. Slower time slicing can allow the Arduino MCU to sleep for longer, without the complexity of a Tickless idle.
Watchdog period options: *
WDTO_15MS*
WDTO_30MS*
WDTO_60MS*
WDTO_120MS*
WDTO_250MS*
WDTO_500MS*
WDTO_1S*
WDTO_2S
Note that Timer resolution is affected by integer math division and the time slice selected. Trying to measure 50ms, using a 120ms time slice for example, won't work.
Stack for the
loop()function has been set at 192 bytes. This can be configured by adjusting the
configMINIMAL_STACK_SIZEparameter. If you have stack overflow issues, just increase it. Users should prefer to allocate larger structures, arrays, or buffers using
pvPortMalloc(), rather than defining them locally on the stack.
Memory for the heap is allocated by the normal
malloc()function, wrapped by
pvPortMalloc(). This option has been selected because it is automatically adjusted to use the capabilities of each device. Other heap allocation schemes are supported by FreeRTOS, and they can used with additional configuration.
loop()or) for any Task overflows, there will be a slow LED blink, with 4 second cycle.
Testing with the Software Serial library shows some incompatibilities at low baud rates (9600), due to the extended time this library disables the global interrupt. Use the hardware USARTs.
The new megaAVR 0-Series devices (eg. ATmega4809) are not fully compatible with this library. Their Timer configuration is substantially different from previous devices, and forms part of a new avr8x architecture. It may be a while until avr-libc is updated to include support for megaAVR devices, but when that happens further work will be added here.
Arduino_FreeRTOS.h: Must always be
#includefirst. It references other configuration files, and sets defaults where necessary.
FreeRTOSConfig.h: Contains a multitude of API and environment configurations.
FreeRTOSVariant.h: Contains the AVR specific configurations for this port of freeRTOS.
heap_3.c: Contains the heap allocation scheme based on
malloc(). Other schemes are available, but depend on user configuration for specific MCU choice.
Arduino FreeRTOS is available in the PlatformIO library manager for use in a PlatformIO project.
Watchdog period is configurable using build-flags:
build_flags = -DportUSE_WDTO=WDTO_15MS
See the Code of conduct.
<!-- ALL-CONTRIBUTORS-BADGE:END -->
Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):
Phillip Stevens 🚧💻👀 |
Hector Espert 💻 |
Floessie 💻 |
Derekduke 💻 |
Balaji.V 💻 |
This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!