The world’s most popular real-time operating system FreeRTOS has celebrated its 15th birthday in Bristol with its creator, Richard Barry.

FreeRTOS supports more than 35 architectures and was downloaded once every 3 minutes during 2017. It is professionally developed, strictly quality controlled, robust, supported, and free to embed in commercial products. Created by Barry (above) in 2003 and supported by Wittenstein High Integrity Systems (WHIS) in Bristol, the open source code is now stewarded by cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services. This opens up Amazon Free RTOS to even more developers around the world working on systems for the Internet of Things (IoT).

WHIS uses the technology as the basis of an operating system for safety-critical applications called SAFERTOS and is continuing to support FreeRTOS developers into the future.

“We’ve enjoyed working with Richard Barry over the years, and SAFERTOS is the ideal solution for FreeRTOS developers that are looking to develop for safety-critical devices,” said Andrew Longhurst, Business Development Manager from WHIS. “Congratulations to FreeRTOS on reaching 15 years, we look forward to continuing to support FreeRTOS developers with SAFERTOS”

WHIS engineers took the FreeRTOS kernel functional model, subjected it to a full assessment and identified all areas of weakness with respect to safety within the functional model and API, and generated a set of safety requirements. The resulting functional and safety requirements sets were put through an IEC 61508-3 SIL 3 development life cycle, the highest possible for a software-only component.

There are fully functional demonstrations of SAFERTOS, and a manual detailing how to upgrade from FreeRTOS to SAFERTOS at http://www.highintegritysystems.com.

Bristol Internet of things Software