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UpcomingIntermediate

RTOS Fundamentals for Real Firmware

A hands-on intermediate course that takes you from bare-metal thinking to RTOS-native firmware design. Covers task lifecycle, priority inversion, queues, semaphores, mutexes, stack sizing, heap strategies, and the debugging techniques that actually work when things go wrong.

Outcomes

  • Design a task hierarchy that avoids priority inversion and starvation
  • Choose the right synchronization primitive for each communication pattern
  • Debug RTOS failures — stack overflow, deadlock, runaway tasks — with or without a JTAG probe

Audience

  • Embedded engineers moving from bare-metal or superloop to RTOS
  • Junior firmware engineers using FreeRTOS without a full mental model
  • Hardware engineers who need to understand the software side of timing

Prerequisites

  • Embedded C programming (pointers, structs, interrupts)
  • Basic understanding of how a microcontroller runs code
  • Familiarity with a development board or simulator

Module list

Module 1

RTOS concepts and task lifecycle

Understand the scheduler, task states, context switching overhead, and why a tick-based RTOS behaves differently from bare-metal.

Module 2

Priority, preemption, and starvation

Design a priority scheme that keeps high-priority work responsive without starving low-priority tasks or creating inversion.

Module 3

Queues, semaphores, and mutexes

Match each primitive to its correct use case and understand the subtle bugs that come from misuse — including binary semaphore as mutex.

Module 4

Stack sizing and heap strategies

Calculate worst-case stack depth, choose the right FreeRTOS heap scheme, and detect overflow before it corrupts memory silently.

Module 5

Interrupts and deferred processing

Implement safe ISR-to-task hand-off, avoid blocking APIs in ISRs, and design deferred interrupt processing with task notification.

Module 6

Debugging RTOS failures in the field

Use FreeRTOS trace hooks, vTaskGetRunTimeStats, and JTAG to diagnose deadlock, stack overflow, missed deadlines, and runaway tasks.

Course body

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