We use FreeRTOS for the majoroty of our Cortex based projects so after the announcement from Amazon a few weeks back regarding their AWS stack support for FreeRTOS we wanted to take a look.

The Hardware and Software Stack

Being impatient I couldn’t wait for a supported dev kit to arrive from Farnell, so I decided to port it over to a board that we already had, the Olimex STM32-E407.

We already had FreeRTOS running on the board (and Chibios!) but I thought for this I would start from fresh. So a quick fork from the official github git repository was made and I then ported the MQTT demo over to a new target.

If anyone is interested then the changes have been pushed back to our git repo on GitHub.

Toolchain

The new demo/port requires a copy of Eclipse CDT and the GNU ARM Embedded Toolchain from Launchpad.

You can use openocd and an STLink V2 to program and debug but any Cortex/STM32 compatible Jtag should do the trick. If you do want to use Eclispe to debug then you will also need to install the GDB Hardware Debugging plugin. Another useful plugin is the FreeRTOS aware kernel debugging plugin from NXP.

NXP FreeRTOS Aware Debugger Eclipse Plugin

You can install the plugin from within Eclipse: From the menu choose “Help > Install New Software” and then use the following update site: http://freescale.com/lgfiles/updates/Eclipse/KDS

Future uses

We are using the port to try out a few ideas and so far it looks good, watch this space for a few more demo apps and maybe integration of a Pic N Mix machine or two 😉