HACK Real-time Operating System
Highly Accelerated Compact Kernel
HACK-RTOS is free,
open-source embedded operating system posed to
support all modern Zilog CPU's. The exact list
of supported microcontrollers is provided below.
It has started in 2006 as a
hobby project. Since then it evolved into a quite
powerful RTOS with preemptive multitasking, lots
of drivers (UART, I2C, SPI, ADC, EMAC, RTC)
and even a TCP/IP stack (eZ80F91). The RTOS
has modular structure with many different
modules providing services like dynamic memory
allocation, inter-thread messages and so on. It
relies on a free integrated development
environment from Zilog (ZDS-II IDE), so there is
no need to spend money. The only thing to lose,
if you decide to try it, is your time. Since I
don't want you to lose time fruitlessly, I took
it upon myself to create reasonable documentation
and examples. Every source file of the RTOS
starts with a statement saying that I cannot
guaranty you anything. The absence of bugs for
instance. That is true, but since you are given
the sources, you may be able to correct bugs.
In order to make the RTOS as
fast as possible I have chosen Assembler as a
programming language. The target hardware
(especially Z8 Encore! XP) has very little RAM,
so the minimization of the memory footprint is
critical. This was another reason for choosing
Assembler. Finally, I didn't want to be
frustrated by bugs in the programming tool.
Assembler is simpler than C compiler, and the
possibility of running into a bug there is less.
The question I'm most
frequently asked is - Why you have chosen Zilog?
This firm appears to be sort of a marginal MCU's
supplier, shadowed by the big ones like
Microchip. I don't much care about that. What is
important to me is: they offer free development
software of reasonable quality, their
development kits are comparably cheap, their
chips and tools have good documentation, I like
the architecture of their CPU cores (Can you
imagine efficient multitasking on MCS-51? I
could not), their technical support is not
perfect, but at least I am getting my questions
answered. Considering all this, I would say
Zilog products are good choice for hobbyists
like me. Long live Zilog!
My name is Alex Krikunov. I am the owner of this site and
the author of HACK-RTOS.
You can reach me by this e-mail:
alex@hack-rtos.ru.
|