A major challenge for developers is how to take advantage of RTOS capabilities to achieve design goals. But even before that there is the problem of picking the right RTOS for the job, easier said than done in a design environment with many alternatives available.

In this first in a series of three blogs on the many uses of RTOS semaphores, Ralph Moore provides some basic guidelines on the use of various types of resource semaphores to control access to hardware resources.

While having the source code for the RTOS you use is important, clean, clear, commented, consistent, and correct code is critical to the success of your design.

How to determine whether or not your application needs to use an embedded OS and if so what factors do you have to consider in picking the right one for your design.

An examination and comparison of existing OSes for WSNs, including TinyOS, Contiki, and LiteOS as well as some traditional embedded RTOSes such as VxWorks.

A comprehensive review of existing work in sensornet (aka IoT) operating system design from the perspective of OS developers and users and a taxonomy of current sensor OS capabilities and features.

A description of RIOT, an open source real time operating system that explicitly considers devices with minimal resources but eases development across a wide range of devices.

How RTOS blocking system calls work and how they can be used to manage CPU time, distribute tasks and manage other resources such as peripherals.

Invented in the age of mainframes and minicomputers, the role of operating system-mediated multitasking is thriving in RTOSes as the best way to manage embedded system resources in real-time and deterministic way.

Ranjit Adiga describes how his company did away with the need for a full RTOS implementation by using a hardware/software system modelling tool to build a dedicated scheduler.

Porting of the Arctic Core operating system commonly used in automotive applications to an ARM-based Raspberry Pi for use in applications based on AUTOSAR.

An extensible RTOS architecture for embedded heterogeneous muti-core processors that splits the RTOS kernel, which runs on a less powerful core and delegates functions to the user-level kernel (UK) that runs on another more powerful core.

On-Demand Webcast & Whitepaper: Java at Work in the Internet of Things Era