"NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory robots need to work in harsh environments, often on the edge of the known Universe."
What?
Amazon FreeRTOS – IoT operating system for microcontrollers
81–90 of 106 posts
Re: Amazon FreeRTOS – IoT operating system for microcontrollers
#82The most useful aspect of this, from my perspective: they've finally abolished the non-FOSS license of the old FreeRTOS, and released it under an actually Open Source license, namely MIT. That's one less headache to deal with.
It's a nice present from Amazon. They should keep doing this, I'd like a MIT licensed QNX next please. God knows they have the money.
I tried to research your statement and landed here[0].
I'm somewhat shocked at how many different competing active RTOS's there actually are. There amount of reinventing the wheel must be huge. I mean I know the wikipedia page on Operating Systems lists a lot more.. but the majority of them are long dead.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_real-time_operat...
Re: Amazon FreeRTOS – IoT operating system for microcontrollers
#83What's the advantage of a RTOS?
Been awhile since I dealt with microcontrollers, but my recollection is that some non-trivial amount of things have to be done by a RTOS. For example if your thing is attached to a sensor that spits out 47 bytes of sensor data every N clock cycles, and has a buffer that is 94 bytes, then you damn well better be reading that thing every N*2 clock cycles with a hard guarantee that your routine is finished copying all 9…
Does an RTOS have a built-in theorem prover to accomplish that?
Re: Amazon FreeRTOS – IoT operating system for microcontrollers
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a nice present from Amazon. They should keep doing this, I'd like a MIT licensed QNX next please. God knows they have the money.
I tried to research your statement and landed here[0]. I'm somewhat shocked at how many different competing active RTOS's there actually are. There amount of reinventing the wheel must be huge. I mean I know the wikipedia page on Operating Systems lists a lot more.. but the majority of them are long dead. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_real-time_operat...
To be fair, a loop spinning and some malloc / free functions in a library are enough to call something a RTOS.
Re: Amazon FreeRTOS – IoT operating system for microcontrollers
#85"NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory robots need to work in harsh environments, often on the edge of the known Universe." What?
It's edge devices man!
Re: Amazon FreeRTOS – IoT operating system for microcontrollers
#86>Amazon FreeRTOS ... and extends it with software libraries that make it easy to securely connect your small, low-power devices to AWS cloud services why do IoT devices have to connect to the cloud? Is there any legitimate use case other than reporting data gathered on the customer? Why do have all these gadgets have to snoop on us?
If you're going to sell a consumer an internet connected device, they're probably going to assume that it'll work on its own and they can review and adjust things on a website (that isn't a 192.0.0.*)
Hm, I wonder if it is just the IP address people don't like to use? Like if it used Bonjour/Avahi and you could (after a bit of initial config) connect to your internet connected lightbulb via http://kitchen-lightbulb.local would that be better?
Re: Amazon FreeRTOS – IoT operating system for microcontrollers
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you care to elaborate on what you believe makes the GPL a non-FOSS license?
It definitely limits the freedom of both the author and user, by restricting the means in which the software may be distributed and the limiting author's right to add additional restrictions (the "all distributions must adhere to these restrictions but can't add more" clause which makes it incompatible with the Apple App Store, for example). It's "Free" in the Free Software Foundation sense but not really in the way…
I think you don't know what GPL is intended for. It's to give the USER the four basic freedoms, not the dev, not the author, the user.
Re: Amazon FreeRTOS – IoT operating system for microcontrollers
#88"NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory robots need to work in harsh environments, often on the edge of the known Universe." What?
It's edge devices man!
Dude, you think this Amazon Cloud Service will still be active when the messages are received?
More important, will the device battery still be charged when it gets a response back?
Re: Amazon FreeRTOS – IoT operating system for microcontrollers
#89>Amazon FreeRTOS ... and extends it with software libraries that make it easy to securely connect your small, low-power devices to AWS cloud services why do IoT devices have to connect to the cloud? Is there any legitimate use case other than reporting data gathered on the customer? Why do have all these gadgets have to snoop on us?
There are some other good reasons mentioned here, but this is the one that makes me glad they are: firmware updates.
Insecurely designed, networked embedded devices are a serious issue. Look at the botnet based on CCTV cameras for an example. A company that doesn't care about security is still going to produce crap devices and isn't going to update, but for a company that cares about security, ability to patch devices in the field is an absolute necessity to stay on top of vulnerabilities.
The ability to add features and keep your device 'fresh' is a nice bonus.
Re: Amazon FreeRTOS – IoT operating system for microcontrollers
#90What's the advantage of a RTOS?
"RTOS" is the term used to describe the core component of most embedded systems. Technically it should mean a scheduler that provides 'bounded latency' in scheduling operations. That means that if a certain (internal or external) event happens, the code to run it should happen with no more than a certain delay.
Embedded systems tend to be doing things that look more like real-time control applications. Let's say the processor is running a radio. It is important that certain requests form the radio hardware are processed quickly enough otherwise the data isn't ready to transmit in the time slot that it is meant to be in, and you don't meet the standard for that protocol.
In practice though, what people are actually wanting is an abstraction around the concepts of scheduling, and facilities like multi-tasking (with pre-emption), and facilities to communicate between tasks in a thread safe way. Mostly they don't need the 'hard' RTOS aspects (and so this is often referred to as 'soft RTOS').
To explain this a little - your traditional simplistic embedded app while look like 'while(1) {}' at the bottom of main. It will sit in a loop servicing the things that need to be serviced - pulling characters off a UART, waggling the line for the LED to make it flash on the right interval etc.. This is fine for a small app on an 8 bit processor but as embedded applications grow, you have a lot of functionality that is all tied up with each other. What an embedded scheduler does is put the main loop at the bottom of the dependency tree rather than the top - modules of code can be separated out and request themselves to be scheduled when necessary allowing for much cleaner separation, and more robust code.