This article is the second installment in a series that details the creation process of a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) sensor beacon (See Part 1). Here, we provide an overview of the firmware structure and functionality without diving into code details. The BLE beacon project is code-named "Athena," you may see this name mentioned in
Communication interfaces (I2C, SPI, UART, etc.) are some of the most commonly used microcontroller peripherals in embedded systems. In this introductory article, we will look at how low-level drivers for such peripherals can be used in FreeRTOS. Polled Drivers vs Interrupt-driven Drivers Based on the method used for getting information on events (e.g errors, operation
In this article, we will take a look at the software timers in FreeRTOS. A software timer allows a function to be executed at a set time in the future.FreeRTOS - RTOS software timer functionality and features description The function that is executed is referred to as a timer's callback function. The interval between starting
FreeRTOS is one of the most widely used open-source real-time operating systems (RTOS). In this article, we will look at a very simple FreeRTOS program: a push-button will enable/disable the blinking of an LED. The program is developed and tested using the LPCXpresso54102 board with NXP's LPC54102 microcontroller. The program can be easily adapted for
In its classic form, a callback (aka callback function) is a function that is passed as an argument to another function. The function that accepts the callback as an argument is expected to call back on it (execute it) at a certain point in time. The callback mechanism allows a lower-level software layer to call
Unaligned memory access is the access of data with a size of N number of bytes from an address that is not evenly divisible by the number of bytes N. If the address is evenly divisible by N, we have aligned memory access. We can express this as Address/N, where Address is the memory address
To better understand the concept of little-endian and big-endian formats we first have to look at how memory is accessed. The memory space of a microprocessor is expected to be byte-addressable. When a CPU has a 32-bit address bus this means that it can access a total of 232 addresses each with a size of
The peripheral access layer is a layer of the firmware that provides access to the registers of a microcontroller's peripheral units. It has to be easy to use, well structured, and efficient. This layer is part of the software packages every microcontroller vendor provides for free with their Software Development Kits (SDK) and Integrated Development
Designing an embedded system that employs a real-time operating system (RTOS) with multitasking behavior means that there will be resources that must be shared between the tasks. These shared resources (e.g peripheral modules, data structures, communication interfaces, etc.) by their nature do not support multiple concurrent accesses. Accessing them without any rules in place may
This article is a natural extension on the topics we covered in Function Calls on ARM Cortex-M Microprocessors. Due to the hardware specifics of the Cortex-M architecture, there is actually a lot of common in how function calls and exceptions are handled. The good thing for us as developers is that all exception handlers can
