Hi All
I would like to point out some new features which have been added to the uTasker project for Kinetis (supporting almost all KE, KEA, KL, KW, KM, K parts) which may be of interest to professionals who are looking for major advantages for their present and future developments.
1. MCUXpressor is now supported which means that any uTasker frameworked project developed with CW, KDS, Atollic or S32 can be moved to MCUXpress with no effort. It can also be built with IAR, Keil, Atollic, CooCox, Green Hills, VS or GCC standalone or moved between these - again with no (or almost zero) effort due to the projects inherent compiler/IDE independancy. The same holds true for most processor types - almost no porting is necessary between device types since all APIs adapt themselves to the underlying HW.
2. Slip and PPP have been added so that TCP/IP project can work on serial lines as well as USB-RNDIS and Ethernet (dual-homed and multiple interfaces possible).
3. Non-blocking FT800 support (this is an FTDI graphics controller which can be connected between an SPI interface and various display types to off-load graphic processing) has been added to the project along with full integration of FTDI's FT800 emulator in the the uTasker simulator so that the graphics controller/display is also simulated. Powerful graphics applications are thus possible with small, cheap Kinetis parts since little RAM and just the SPI is required.
4. Possibly the new feature that may be the most interesting for many developers is the integration of the latest FreeRTOSv9.0.0 into the project. This allows native FreeRTOS (no special port or additional libraries needed) to be used on all Kinetis parts (and future FreeRTOS versions can simply be "dropped in" when they are available) - but the most exciting is that two operating systems are run in parallel: FreeRTOS runs any tasks that can benefit from pre-emptive characteristics and any existing project code that may be available to be reused in new design; the uTasker OS runs in parallel to allow all task that are more suited to co-operative behavior (lower memory footprint, easier behavior monitoring) to be handled by this part, along with various libraries that are not otherwise available natively to FreeRTOS users (low footprint and wide-scope FAT, USB, TCP/IP or MODBUS libraries, for example) to be immediately usable - again with almost no project development overhead.
Although not yet fully possible with the present version, it is hoped that soon also FreeRTOS users will be able to benefit from full Kinetis simulation (peripherals, interrupts, DMA) and almost real-time pre-emptive OS operation in the Visual Studio development environment. FreeRTOS has very limited native Windows testing support at the moment (with no peripherals and no actual task switching code that can be viewed) and this would allow massive simplifications in the future once ready.
All new developments are validated in real product developments (not just examples that need to be completed and made reliable) and new users receive professional support when needed. There are potentially major advantages in Kinetis based project developments to reduce time-to-market, improved code reuse and ever increasing flexible, powerful OS/integrated features that cover a very wide range of requirements.
Regards
Mark