Operating System on 8051 uC

[electroRF]

Hi,
I've used to work with 8051 uC of TI.
I had Zigbee Stack on it, and I wrote my own application code (in main) and Low-Level code.

I see in many places where developers state that they are using a certain Operating System on their uC, e.g. VxWorks.

I actually had no idea what kind of operating system i had.

How can I tell?

I googled TI's Zigbee Stack and TI's 8051uC but got no operating system.

Thank you.

 

[Ian Rogers]

You haven't much choice on the 8051.. There are one or two.. https://www.freertos.org/portcygn.html
I bet this would work.... It works with SDCC..

Keil do one https://www.keil.com/rtos/tpcl/403.htm

But the chips too small really...

 

[electroRF]

Hi Ian,
Thank you

The 8051 uC I worked with was CC2430 of TI, using IAR IDE.

I read the two links provided, but I still don't manage to figure out which operation system ran on the CC2430 uC

 

[Ian Rogers]

I'm not overly conversant with TI stuff However!!! I have used XRF modules from Ciseco http://www.ciseco.co.uk

These are based on a TI 8051 uC...

 

[3v0]

Most people and applications do not need an OS on micro controllers.

The Zigbee stacks may have some OS like features but I would not call them a general purpose OS. They are tuned to make the mesh net go.

 

[electroRF]

Hi 3V and Ian.
Thank you.

Why does one need RTOS?

When I write my main Application, I for example wrote state machine in the I2C ISR, and the main is free to do whatever it needs to.

So, why would I need RTOS if I can write my own code?

 

[ikalogic]

If you can do what you need without any RTOS, then just keep it like that...

I have worked with RTOS before (because i had no other choice), and IMHO, on most small & medium sized MCUs, it does not make sense.

RTOS are supposed to help you dissociate the HAL (Hardware abstraction layer) from your application layer, and make it portable from any device to another. The principle is good, but in this process, you very often loose a big amount of processing power... so, if you want optimized code, don't use RTOS!