FreeRTOS has a great performance measurement feature built-in: Performance counters. At each context switch, the RTOS can do a bookkeeping of time spent in tasks. With this, it can estimate the runtime distribution between the tasks. A very useful feature to get a feeling what the tasks are doing.
But I noticed that with recent FreeRTOS versions, VS Code extension have issues showing the correct runtime counter values:
The year 2024 is coming to its end, time for a Year-End-Processor-Expert-Component-Release.
Also, this is now the 10th anniversary of the releases on Sourceforge, starting with https://mcuoneclipse.com/2014/10/21/mcuoneclipse-releases-on-sourceforge/ back in 2014.
Continue readingThere is a new feature in the SEGGER SystemView: the ability to plot any data provided by the application, for example sensor data or any other useful data:
In case you are looking for an unusual business card, company badge or event badge holder, then this article is for you: A DIY RFID badge and business card with bling-bling addressable RGB LEDs to impress your customer, clients, friends at work or at a conference, packed with electronics. Plus it includes 10 original tools from Victorinox, the manufacturer of the Swiss Army Knife.
The latest FreeRTOS V11 release includes an interesting feature: a heap protector feature, which can help detect memory corruption early at runtime.
The ‘Verkehrshaus der Schweiz‘, the ‘Swiss Museum of Transport’ is Switzerland’s most popular museum.
In April 2023, it opened up a new building and the ‘Experience Energy!’ exhibition. For the opening event we created a unique construction kit to explore energy: from harvesting to storing and up to distributing and using energy.
Maybe you are using a multi-core device in your projects, but have not tapped into multi-core usage yet? FreeRTOS V11.0 is out, and the big news is that it has finally Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) integrated into the mainline. This greatly simplifies FreeRTOS usage, as I finally can use the same RTOS for my SMP targets and boards, and I can easily switch between single-core and multi-core applications.
Clock projects are cool. LED projects are cool too. And if it moves, the better. So why not building a moving pixel LED mechatronics clock? A matrix with addressable RGB LEDs, each can change color and is moved by a tiny stepper motor, to let pixels stand out?
The new year 2024 is coming, so time to close the current year with a new release: I’m pleased to announce a new release of the Processor Expert components, available on SourceForge and GitHub.
In many of my embedded projects I need persistent data or storage for settings. If using an SD card, then FatFS is usually my choice for the file system. But if using an external FLASH memory device, then my preferred choice is usually LittleFS: it is a little fail-safe filesystem, designed for micro-controllers, which I’m using with external flash memory devices.
In the case where there is enough MCU flash, or if there is no external FLASH device available in a design, it can use the MCU internal FLASH as storage storage too. This is the topic of this article:
MCU on Eclipse