Even though FreeRTOS is primarily an embedded OS, we can still test FreeRTOS on Linux without any special software or emulators. The majority of code should be portable across platforms and not depend on MCU-specific functions. That means we can run/test/develop the code on any computer, as well as on a CI/CD server.

This article goes from running FreeRTOS-provided code, then running a simple Comms example, then running your own code.

Table of Contents

Setup

Download the UWOrbital-firmware-21 folder to a location. Download the FreeRTOS source code to the same location. For example, if you placed it in the Desktop folder, the folder structure should look something like this.

/Desktop/UWOrbital-firmware-21
/Desktop/FreeRTOS

Be careful when cloning FreeRTOS, as you may not have cloned with submodules enabled. Check inside FreeRTOS/FreeRTOS/Source/ directories to make sure you have .c files there.

Make sure you also have gcc and make installed.

Now, you're ready to run the provided demos and Comms code.

Running the FreeRTOS Demo

FreeRTOS comes with demos for desktop.

cd FreeRTOS/FreeRTOS/Demo/Posix_GCC/
make

You should see a lot of text as make compiles the demo application. If there are any errors, it is highly because you don't have gcc or make installed. Feel free to post in the #CDH channel, and someone will probably find the problem.

To run