HeatheRTOS is a lightweight real time embedded kernel designed for use in robotic control applications. All user tasks have direct access to peripheral hardware (flat address space) and all kernel operations take constant time. The kernel and user space code is compiled into a single binary image which can be loaded and started using a bootloader such as uBoot. Hardware floating point is also supported by the kernel.

For more information about the kernel, see the included whitepaper and porting guide in the doc directory. I'm sacrificing keeping some of the documentation entirely up to date in favour of actually implementing features. If you have questions, and/or would like to help/contribute, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me.

As currently checked out fresh, the code is configured to build for beaglebone black.

To compile the code, run 'make'. The arm-none-eabi- toolchain is assumed, edit the Makefile if you are using something else. However, I've only built it with the eabi gcc, so no promises it will work.

Once the code is done compiling, a directory called "build" will have been created. It contains both hrtos.elf and a uImage file. I will discuss now how to load the uImage file with uBoot.

Power on the beaglebone, with your serial debug cable/terminal set up. Press a key to stop the uBoot countdown when prompted. Once at the uBoot prompt, enter the following two commands:

set loadaddr 0x40300000 loady

The first tells uBoot to load the image it receives into the on-chip SRAM in the am355x. The second tells it to accept an image file via y-modem over the debug serial port. Use your serial terminal to dump the file.

Once the file transfer has finished, enter the following command:

go 0x40300000

It is relatively simple to configure uBoot to automatically load the same uImage file from the external SD card and run it. It can be done from the uEnv.txt file.