NuttX RTOS

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May 062009
 
NuttX RTOS

NuttX is yet another small RTOS for microcontrollers. Works best on not-so-small ones (128kB FLASH, 16kB RAM). LPC2148 suits this very well.

What attracted me to it was the list of ports, one example program (nsh which is a small shell, which is great for interactively testing), and the existence of a graphics library and the great support from Greg Nutt, the main developer.

Time from reporting a bug to fixing it: less then 2h. Take that, Sun and Veritas!

  4 Responses to “NuttX RTOS”

  1. akshaymishra says:
    2009-07-10 at 12:20

    Any comparison notes with freertos for nuttx ?

    Thanks,
    Akshay

  2. harald says:
    2009-07-10 at 21:52

    NuttX and FreeRTOS are quite comparable IMHO. NuttX has some features I like a lot: Great support from Gregory. Standard POSIX compliant (within its limits of being a small RTOS). Standard (Unix) device tree. Some drivers, e.g. serial port driver and SD card support. Standard library is included for various CPUs. And there is nsh, which is a small shell. Very useful for interactively testing. Easy to extend too.

    Advantages of FreeRTOS are: It’s smaller (about 4kB min size, NuttX starts at about 20kB). Runs on more CPUs. Great forum too. However you start pretty much at zero. But there are lots of examples out there.
    And the community around FreeRTOS is larger.

    I’d recommend everyone to look at both as long as both are available for your CPU or CPU family. And if not (yet), Greg will port it to a new CPU, and in FreeRTOS’ case, chances are that someone else wants to use your special CPU too.

    For LPC2148 (512kB FLASH, 32+8kB RAM) I’d go for NuttX.

  3. akshaymishra says:
    2009-07-11 at 11:03

    Thanks ! I just made a LPC2148 board. Will keep you posted.

    -Akshay

  4. ktownsend says:
    2009-07-15 at 01:23

    I was fairly impressed by NuttX as well and am interested in getting it to work on an LPC2478 (since it has an LCD controller). Interesting blog, as well. I came across it via google, but there are some interesting blog entries.

    Kevin
    Paris, France