FreeRTOS in Practice

Learn to build firmware that keeps working when the timing gets tight.

Many embedded projects start as a single loop and slowly turn into a tangle of flags, delays, and interrupt handlers. FreeRTOS gives you the tools to fix that, but only if you know how to use them under real constraints. This book shows you how, one working example at a time.

Across fourteen chapters you move from your first task to complete, production-minded firmware. You will learn to:

• Create, schedule, and prioritize tasks, and reason about deadlines, latency, and jitter


• Pass data safely with queues, notifications, and stream buffers


• Protect shared resources with semaphores and mutexes, and avoid priority inversion and deadlock


• Handle interrupts correctly with the FromISR APIs


• Manage stacks and heap memory, and catch overflows early


• Use software timers and event groups


• Write peripheral drivers and use both cores of the ESP32


• Debug, test, and measure performance


• Add watchdogs and fault recovery for reliable products

Examples target the ESP32 with ESP-IDF, with guidance for STM32 and other Cortex-M parts. Projects include failure experiments so you can watch your design break and then fix it. Written for developers who know basic embedded C.