Embedded.com Feature

Embedded.com have just posted a small feature on Atomthreads. See the original article here.

LONDON — Atomthreads is an open source RTOS developed in the UK and its first release contains a port to the Atmel AVR architecture.

The developer Kelvin Lawson, who is a professional embedded systems developer wrote the RTOS in his spare time, said it is not just targeted at 8-bit CPUs but that he used a CPU with limited resources for initial development in order to enforce a lightweight design that will scale very well to more advanced architectures.

The next port is likely to be ARM7, and I plan to add support for other architectures as the project progresses.

The RTOS is intended for embedded systems developers who require a simple lightweight scheduler to incorporate in their projects, it provides real time threading support and standard RTOS features within a few small, highly portable files. Released under the flexible BSD license, Atomthreads provides a free solution suitable for commercial use without royalties or restrictions.

According to Lawson, embedded systems developers considering other open source operating systems but who do not need or already have their own IP stack, file systems and other components can benefit from the reduced complexity and effort of integrating only a simple scheduler library.

Similarly developers who might otherwise roll their own in-house scheduler can save both development and validation time by dropping in this ready-made and fully validated scheduler library. Atomthreads should provide such projects a solution which reduces development time and costs.

An initial port is available for the Atmel AVR/ATmega architecture, with additional ports in development including 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit architectures.

Visit Atomthreads to download the source code for free and obtain further information.