Comparing freertos vs mbed

Mbed OS
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Has anyone use both freertos and mbed. What are thoughts on this comparison

thanks

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I have, and also ChibiOS.

They are all good, well tested, used a lot, with a lot of resources available.

In the end, and it’s a personal choice, we settled with mbed for different reasons:

  • their style style is the closest to how I personally write code so it fits perfectly in our application.
  • the github repository is really alive, a lot of super interesting discussions take place there, they listen to feedback even from non contributors and it really gives you a clear picture of how they work, how they are organized and where mbed is going, and I can say I’m super excited!
  • the documentation is really well designed, with a lot of concrete examples. The porting guide is especially useful. The documentation is also open source on github so you can see the next changes and make PRs if needed
  • the team behind mbed seems to be workin really well all together. From the people at ARM, to the people at ST, Embedded Planet and the like, they all collaborate, listen to each other and bring the best solutions to make mbed as good as possible

Hope this helps.

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FreeRTOS is just the kernel part for an OS, Mbed covers more components such as peripheral devices, Interfaces like SPI, UART, I2C, digital / analog I/O, Ethernet, USB, Storage with different filesystems and storage devices and much more. Many of these components have to interact with the OS in form of threads, semaphores, mutexes. FreeRTOS has of course also a bunch of RTOS features, but you have to combine them with the interfaces and higher level components by yourself. There are now a number of FreeRTOS+ addons, but I don’t know if they all are also free and how many plattforms they now cover.
And Mbed is an OS without OS, you can use many API without RT and just an event system, that makes the applications leaner for mcu with low resources.

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