"Morten M J�rgensen" <neax@fake.mail.com> wrote in message
news:466f93fc$0$143$edfadb0f@dread11.news.tele.dk...
> Thanks allot for all your replies - great help!
>
> We have not totally discarded the possibility of commercial products.
>
> RTX RealTime Kernel and TCP/IP from Keil are under consideration - any
> commets on this choice?
>
> "Morten M J�rgensen" <neax@fake.mail.com> skrev i en meddelelse
> news:466e4f20$0$178$edfadb0f@dread11.news.tele.dk...
I am working on a project using FreeRTOS. I was exploring FreeRTOS + uip vs.
RTX + TCP/IP (Keil). I got very nervous about the selection of the Ethernet
controller, device drive and TCP/IP stack and was basically sold on going
the commercial route for that reason. However, our requirement for Ethenet
went away and we went with FreeRTOS. The key here is with what tools? We are
using Eclipse + GNUARM + Cygwin succesfully but it was a bit of pain
initially, but we are are comfortable with them now. If you can afford
commercially supported tools for all of your developers don't hesitate to go
that path. If you can't then that is a different issue. Cost was a huge
issue for us.
TC
Its cheap to buy the book to get the source to have a play, but what are
the commercial product licencing fees like?
Reply by Paul Burke●June 13, 20072007-06-13
Eric wrote:
> uC/OS II is a possible alternative to FreeRTOS. It's not open source
> but is very cheap.
Unless they've changed their pricing structure, their price for
commercial applications ($1200 per application) is not particularly cheap.
Reply by ●June 13, 20072007-06-13
Thanks allot for all your replies - great help!
We have not totally discarded the possibility of commercial products.
RTX RealTime Kernel and TCP/IP from Keil are under consideration - any
commets on this choice?
"Morten M J�rgensen" <neax@fake.mail.com> skrev i en meddelelse
news:466e4f20$0$178$edfadb0f@dread11.news.tele.dk...
> Hello all,
>
> We are looking for very reliable freeware for the ARM7 microcontroller
> (NXP). The target application is for proffesional use which sets high
> requirements for reliability. The product is very cost-sensitive which has
> made us looking for freeware alternatives to the commercial/proffessional
> RTOS and TCP/IP stacks.
>
> We are currently considering:
>
> http://www.sics.se/~adam/uip/
>
> http://www.freertos.org/embeddedtcp.html
>
>
> Any comments on these ?
>
> Does any of you know of other high quality freeware (preferably well
> documented) or maybe have some proffessional experience with some of the
> freeware sources available on the web ?
>
> Thanks in advance
>
> Best Regards
>
> Morten M. J�rgensen.
>
Reply by CBFalconer●June 12, 20072007-06-12
"Morten M J�rgensen" wrote:
>
> We are looking for very reliable freeware for the ARM7
> microcontroller (NXP). The target application is for proffesional
> use which sets high requirements for reliability. The product is
> very cost-sensitive which has made us looking for freeware
> alternatives to the commercial/proffessional RTOS and TCP/IP stacks.
Don't confuse the IP stack and the RTOS. These are often joined at the
hip, but sometimes one RTOS can use different IP stacks.
The uIP stack is very lightweight and slow:
http://www.sics.se/~adam/uip/
lwIP seems to be a little richer, but it takes more RAM and flash:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/lwip
uC/OS II is a possible alternative to FreeRTOS. It's not open source
but is very cheap.
http://www.micrium.com/products/rtos/kernel/rtos.html
Comercially, Interniche and CMX offer great stacks.
eCOS seems a little fat for my meager requirements. Maybe others here
can point out some tutorial web pages to help people get up to speed
with it.
Eric
Reply by David Brown●June 12, 20072007-06-12
Morten M J�rgensen wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> We are looking for very reliable freeware for the ARM7 microcontroller
> (NXP). The target application is for proffesional use which sets high
> requirements for reliability. The product is very cost-sensitive which has
> made us looking for freeware alternatives to the commercial/proffessional
> RTOS and TCP/IP stacks.
>
Be careful with the term "freeware", which is not very well defined, and
covers a broad spectrum of zero purchase price licenses. What you are
probably looking for is some sort of open source solution, and you
should be aware that these often come with restrictions of some sort.
For example, FreeRTOS is available as open source, but has the
restriction that any changes you make to the FreeRTOS software must be
made available to your customers (but not any software of your own, even
if it is linked together). These are, of course, perfectly fair and
reasonable terms, and there is also a commercial license available if
you don't want to make your changes available (but of course, that costs
money, albeit not much).
Open source is often the right choice, all other things being equal, but
the main benefits are in the freedoms it gives you rather than the
purchase cost price, and if you are just out looking for freebies,
you've missed the point.
I haven't used either of these myself, but I've heard many good things
about them. I've no reason to suspect they are not at least as good as
any commercial alternatives with the same feature set. But again, you
should chose these with the understanding of what the open source
licenses give you, and what they ask of you.
As another poster has said, if your volumes are high (and if they are
not, then why are you so price-conscious?), then many commercial systems
have very low or free per-unit prices, and the cost of purchase can be
considered part of the development costs. It's up to you to examine the
choices, and consider the entire costs - if a commercial OS will save a
month of a developers time, then it will quickly pay for itself. Of
course, there is absolutely no reason to suspect that a given commercial
tool *will* save you time - it could just as easily cost you more time.
Other things to look at are things like support (if you are not paying
anything, you can't expect more than mailing-list support - but it can
be far better to get good email answers directly from the developers and
users than a badly implemented commercial support telephone hotline).
Also look at installation (sometimes open source products require a bit
more thought during installation, rather than a point-and-drool
"wizard"), and installation licenses (with open source, you can install
what you like, where you like - commercial systems often require battles
with dongles, MAC addresses, registration, and so on). And with open
source software, you don't need run-time licenses - even if a commercial
system has very low costs for such licenses, management of them can be a
bureaucratic complication.
> Does any of you know of other high quality freeware (preferably well
> documented) or maybe have some proffessional experience with some of the
> freeware sources available on the web ?
>
> Thanks in advance
>
> Best Regards
>
> Morten M. J�rgensen.
>
>
Reply by Grant Edwards●June 12, 20072007-06-12
On 2007-06-12, Morten M J�rgensen <neax@fake.mail.com> wrote:
> We are looking for very reliable freeware for the ARM7 microcontroller
> (NXP).
I've been using eCos for many years on ARM7 with good results:
http://ecos.sourceware.org/
--
Grant Edwards grante Yow! I brought my BOWLING
at BALL -- and some DRUGS!!
visi.com
Reply by Guy Macon●June 12, 20072007-06-12
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8Bit
Morten M J�rgensen wrote:
>We are looking for very reliable freeware for the ARM7 microcontroller
>(NXP). The target application is for proffesional use which sets high
>requirements for reliability. The product is very cost-sensitive which has
>made us looking for freeware alternatives to the commercial/proffessional
>RTOS and TCP/IP stacks.
Two comments:
[1] Once you get down to the short list, the one with the best
documentation is likely to be the highest quality as well. Not
always, but that's the way to bet.
[2] Don't rule out commercial products. Look for something with
a fixed fee for the system and no per-unit fee for the target
systems. If your product is high volume the per-unit cost will
be low. (and if you are making a low-volume cost-sensitive
product, you aren't counting the development costs properly).
--
Guy Macon
<http://www.guymacon.com/>