Today was my second day at the Masters 2008. After attending a number of excellent PIC32 classes (taught by the same architects and engineers that designed the chip and its libraries and tools) I sneaked out and went looking for a hands on class introducing the freeRTOS port for the PIC24 and PIC32.
freeRTOS is one of the few Real Time Operating Systems that have been ported to a large selection of microcontrollers commonly used in embedded control applications. Previous PIC architectures had been supported in the past but of course the PIC24 and PIC32 are now part of the list.
The integration with the MPLAB C30 and C32 compilers is quite natural and even the MPLAB IDE recognizes the tool and allows you to inspect the list of active tasks and perform some basic debugging.
If you are like me, looking for a way to run multiple software libraries (Graphics, USB, TCP/IP etc ), you are most probably looking for a small and inexpensive RTOS that can help you manage the complexity.
Check out the freeRTOS web site, it might just be what the doctor ordered!
