Porting FreeRTOS to Arduino Mega2560 – Anyone Tried?

Projects Programming
1

Hi all,

I’ve read that it’s possible to run FreeRTOS on an Arduino Mega2560, But I can’t find a clear, step-by-step guide on how to actually port.

I’m not building a full project just curious to explore FreeRTOS tasks, queues, Mutex and semaphores on Arduino Mega2560 and see how it works

anyone here tried it?

2

Where did you see this ?

3

Why on Mega?
why not to probe RTOS in a MCU, that uses it from a box, from example on ESP32?

4

Doesn’t this link say https://docs.arduino.cc/libraries/freertos/

5

Because I already have a Mega on hand

6

Yes, it does say that FreeRTOS can be run on a Mega but how was I to know where you had seen that advice ?

Why not install the library, which is available from the IDE Library Manager, and try the examples yourself

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7

Thanks. I’ve installed the library and ran the example code for task status. The LED blinked as expected, and on the Serial Monitor I only get “Suspend!” and “Resume!” when I send the respective commands.

8

With the limited resources of the Mega use of FreeRTOS is more of a demo and “because we can”.

If you want to seriously explore the capabilities I would suggest an ESP32 or Raspberry Pi Pico for about the same price as a Mega. They have much more powerful processors, more memory, and higher clock speeds. They also have dual cores so you experience why synchronization is important.

9

I'd say it's just as important on a single core processor when time sliced multi-tasking in involved.

10

Of course it is important when multitasking on a single processor. But with a singe processor there are things you can get away with because only one task is running at a time. Some operations that are relatively atomic on a single core may not be with multiple cores.

EDIT:
If you are using the FreeRTOS support you should be OK. It is when you try to get fancy with your own sync attempts you need to be careful.