Use of FreeRTOS in Teaching Real-time Embedded Systems Design Course

This paper presents our experiences of teaching the course “Real-time Embedded Systems Design” by applying the free and open source Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) called FreeRTOS. The emphasis is placed on how we adopted FreeRTOS as a real-world RTOS example in both lectures and lab sessions from exercises preparation, lab equipment setup to lab organization. Compared with existing real-time computing courses, the main difference of this course is that we focus on teaching students the design and application development of real-time embedded systems from the practitioner’s point of view, instead of introducing research or theoretical topics. FreeRTOS is a real-time kernel/scheduler designed to run on a microcontroller for embedded applications. It supports a large number of underlying microcontroller architectures and has become the leading real-time computing platform for microcontrollers. In this course, it has been applied to conducting experiments with multitask scheduling algorithms and the real-time interfacing with microcontrollers for all our lab sessions and course projects. Our primary experiences indicate that FreeRTOS is a richly featured, cost-efficient and well supported RTOS for teaching real-time systems design and developing microcontroller-based real-time applications.