ChibiOS Free Embedded RTOS

Hi, I am using Arduino and nRF24l01+ radio for some tests of WSN projects. To use this radio, the best driver/library I have seen so far is tmrh20's ( https://github.com/TMRh20/RF24 ). Until now, I implemented my projects without any OS, but recently some mechanisms demanded preemption, mutual exclusion and threads would also be welcome , so I thought that using ChibiOS/RT or NIL would be useful.

Is there a way to use these OS with tmrh20's library without modifying it to use HAL?
Would it work if I executed the radio methods (which use SPI) as atomic operations, in order to keep using this library?

Thanks

Your best bet would be to use:

https://github.com/greiman/ChibiOS-Arduino

The libraries would than work "as is". If you want to run natively you'll probably have to change your compiler from gcc to g++ and create some small adapter to glue the Arduino SPI calls to the HAL SPI.

Cheers,
Fabio Utzig

Thanks for your reply utzig
Browsing through projects of Arduino RTOS I also found NilRTOS ( https://github.com/greiman/NilRTOS-Arduino ) from this same author, which I think would work the same way of ChibiOS Arduino but with less overhead, right?

As I have no experience with these OS yet, does anybody think this approach of doing radio calls "atomic" would work?

Yes, Nil is more lightweight than ChibiOS/RT. What do you mean by "atomic" radio operations?

I mean to disable interrupts and preemption during radio operations like radio.write(), radio.read(), etc, so SPI operations are not interrupted and no further modification on the driver is necessary...

You would probably not need to do that, but it should also not stop anything from working just cause extra latency.