Impressions of CCS RTOS in PIC-C

[bkamen]

Hey there,

I was looking at the #USE RTOS again for something and was wondering what the various experiences people have had here using it.

Anyone do anything cool/reasonably big using the RTOS they thought had good outcomes versus something like an interrupt driven w/more free running environment?


Thanks,

-Ben
_________________
Dazed and confused? I don't think so. Just "plain lost" will do. :D

[newguy]

I haven't used the CCS RTOS but I have to support several projects that use the RTXC RTOS, but not on a PIC.

For things like user interfaces (many different "screens" on a graphical display) and handling button presses, a RTOS makes things a bit easier. However, getting down to the dirty details of reacting to fast events, messages (such as CAN messages), I find a RTOS makes that truly difficult. I'm uncovering issues that we thought were due to hardware that are actually weird race conditions caused by the RTOS.

A redesign of our system is on the books and I'm definitely turfing the RTOS approach. I frankly haven't seen anything that the RTOS does that can't be done in a traditional interrupt-driven approach. In fact, the RTOS tends to hide things under many layers of abstraction and is a real pain to troubleshoot, especially when you're dealing with 10 year old code which has been added to by 5 different individuals over the years.

I know this isn't the information you were looking for, but hopefully you find it relevant.

[bkamen]