Node to cloud IOT connectivity on Amazon Web Services FreeRTOS for ST STM32L4 TI CC3220SF and NXP LPC54018 MCUs

Date: 12/12/2017
Most of the embedded system engineers designing IOT systems using microcontroller chips are aware of the free and popular real-time operating system FreeRTOS. Free RTOS is developed by Richard Barry around 2003 and was maintained by its company Real Time Engineers Ltd. Now in the year 2017, Richard Barry joined Amazon AWS and FreeRTOS is offered as MIT licensed AWS open source project that gives plenty of freedom to design and use freeRTOS for commercial purposes. Already popular FreeRTOS will gather further steam by having support from Amazon AWS. The kernel version 10 is available now on the Amazon cloud, added with two new features called stream buffers and message buffers. Stream buffers pass a continuous stream of bytes, whereas message buffers pass variable-sized but discrete messages.

Amazon FreeRTOS now immediately fully supports LPC54018 MCU from NXP Semiconductor, STM32L4 series microcontroller from ST, and CC3220SF MCU from TI to enable IoT cloud connectivity. With this, IoT device applications can take advantage of the capabilities of the cloud or continue processing data locally with AWS Greengrass. The tools at Amazon FreeRTOS helps engineers to quickly and easily deploy an MCU-based connected device and develop an IoT application with less compexity and less cost. AWS IoT services rises the accessibility of node-to-cloud connection for engineers. Distributed and autonomous computing architectures become possible through the consistent interface provided between the nodes and their gateways, in both online and offline scenario.

The starter kit for Amazon FreeRTOS is ST Microelectronics’s B-L475E-IOT01A Discovery kit for IoT node and is powered by STM32L4 series microcontroller. Version of the OS and libraries are immediately available to run on the ultra-low-power STM32L4 series of microcontrollers.

The AWS IoT software development kit is available for TI's low power Simplelink WiFi CC3200 wireless MCU LaunchPad kit.

PUF (physical unclonable function) featured LPC54018 MCU based NXP’s IoT module is co-developed with Embedded Artists; supports AWS FreeRTOS.

IOT software development kits for connecting embedded devices to cloud require source files such as Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), TLS implementation, and some examples for sending and receiving data to the cloud, which seeks developer to create project integrated SDK with another real-time operating system and add user certificate, and test the cloud connectivity. Now with this Amazon FreeRTOS SDK having all these software components integrated in a single package reduces development time and effort.

Author: Srinivasa Reddy N
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