Is there any book/ebook about ChibiOS?

[kermitas]

Hello,

is there any book or eBook about ChibiOS?

It is very hard to complete knowledge about system jumping on forum, reading /demo and /test codes and reading online html documentation http://chibios.sourceforge.net/html/ that looks like API.

I saw my friends FreeRTOS book "Using the FreeRTOS Real Time Kernel - A Practical Guide - Cortex-M3 Edition.pdf". I read it and in about one hour a knowed almost all about the system! I saw examples, use cases, very nice pieces of code...

Then I spend half of the day to find some articles/tutorials/examples about ChibiOS and found only this one presentation: rtos_chibios_handout.pdf (.

Now I spend almost whoe day to find how to nicely malloc/free memory and send objects thru mailboxes between threads. I hate to watch only /test/testpools.c, I don't know that is THD_WA_SIZE, I don't know what is wa[] and where it is allocated.

Giovanni, is there any nice book or articles that covers basics of the system? Where can I find examples, use cases but not just performance tests?

Thanks,
Arthur.

[Giovanni]

Hi,

In the documentation section there are a set of "how to" articles, did you find those helpful? probably would be a good idea to expand them (feel free to suggest topics for new articles).

About the book, this is a recurring request but it seems there is not an agreement on which kind of book to make, you seem to want some kind of manual with examples, others suggested some kind of general introduction to RTOS technology using ChibiOS.

ciao,
Giovanni

[kermitas]

Hi,

In the documentation section there are a set of "how to" articles, did you find those helpful? probably would be a good idea to expand them (feel free to suggest topics for new articles).

About the book, this is a recurring request but it seems there is not an agreement on which kind of book to make, you seem to want some kind of manual with examples, others suggested some kind of general introduction to RTOS technology using ChibiOS.

ciao,
Giovanni

Tahank for response. I know almost all "how to"s from documentation secion .

[Badger]

I'd agree that some sort of book would be immensely helpful for getting started. I'd never used a RTOS before I stumbled across Chibios, and had not much experience with multhithreaded synchronisation, so it took me a while to work out how I should do things. Could we do a collaborative book on the main web page wiki? I'd happily contribute! I think that many of the important things (e.g mutexes, semaphores, etc) are already covered, but would be more useful if the documentation was structured differently, leading the reader into their use, maybe in the context of an example project, explaining why each item was used in each case. Might be sensible to design such an example project around a commonly available board, maybe the STM32F4 discovery as that is quite popular at the moment. but it should also be applicable to any supported platform!

[Giovanni]

That would be a nice idea, I'll look into setting up an user section.

Giovanni

[kermitas]

I'd agree that some sort of book would be immensely helpful for getting started. I'd never used a RTOS before I stumbled across Chibios, and had not much experience with multhithreaded synchronisation, so it took me a while to work out how I should do things. Could we do a collaborative book on the main web page wiki? I'd happily contribute! I think that many of the important things (e.g mutexes, semaphores, etc) are already covered, but would be more useful if the documentation was structured differently, leading the reader into their use, maybe in the context of an example project, explaining why each item was used in each case. Might be sensible to design such an example project around a commonly available board, maybe the STM32F4 discovery as that is quite popular at the moment. but it should also be applicable to any supported platform!

I had similar thoughts today!

I thought about:
- starting my own little blog and post there my own examples, information about configuration etc...
- post at this forum many requests: Giovanni, plese, write example of his, please write example of that... and after some time askim him to move those examples into "how to" section (there are already 5 examples)

About the collaborative wiki book.
If there is no book already then I think that for start we can publish as many small examples as we can. Examples about how to create this, how to configure that, how to use memory pools, how to use mailboxes with threads. Examples just like this "how to create a thread" in "how to" section.
Why I am writing about bunch of examples against book?
1) my english is not so well
2) writing examples are much, much easier than write a book
3) writing simple code samples are much, much faster for me, for Giovanni and of course for you Badger

Thanks,
Arthur.

[kermitas]

I'd agree that some sort of book would be immensely helpful for getting started. I'd never used a RTOS before I stumbled across Chibios, and had not much experience with multhithreaded synchronisation, so it took me a while to work out how I should do things.

Dear Badger,

How did you start? Where did you look? What did you read?
Do you have any links? Books?
How and where did you learn C and ChibiOS?

Now I think that maybe we should start to create forum section or blog? We will mark each post with tags like "code sample", "link", "configuration", ...

[barthess]

Hi guys,
Creating of well structured book is hard work. If we decide to write "The ChibiOS/RT handbook" what about community repo (on github, sourceforge, etc.) with book in LaTeX format? My English in not very good to write articles but I can take the layout of document and some examples writing. I have experience with multidocument sets based on GNU make + LaTeX. Book structure can be discuss in this topic.

[Badger]

How did you start? Where did you look? What did you read?
Do you have any links? Books?
How and where did you learn C and ChibiOS?

I mostly leanrt by experimentation, following the guides and reading the documentation, but some things took longer to learn because they are only in the docs, which is a reference not a guide! I was already familiar with C so that part was easy.

Hi guys,
Creating of well structured book is hard work. If we decide to write "The ChibiOS/RT handbook" what about community repo (on github, sourceforge, etc.) with book in LaTeX format? My English in not very good to write articles but I can take the layout of document and some examples writing. I have experience with multidocument sets based on GNU make + LaTeX. Book structure can be discuss in this topic.

I like the idea of using LaTeX, that gets my vote. I can fix any english errors With LaTeX we should also be able to generate nice html.

[/url=http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Collaborative_Writing_of_LaTeX_Documents]Collaborative_Writing_of_LaTeX_Documents[/url] might be a good read for ideas.

[Giovanni]

I use LaTeX for PDF manual generation, I always found it hard to use, it could be a deterrent to a collaborative effort, the toolkits weighting hundreds of megabytes would not help too.

The wiki has several advantages to be considered:
1) It is possible to link files.
2) It is online.
3) No need for tools.
4) The syntax is very simple.
5) The formatting is not left to the writer so all pages look consistent.

Another alternative is DITA which has a lot of advantages over LaTeX but it would be hard to setup, it is widely used at corporate level.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Inf ... chitecture

I agree with Barthes about the need to create a meaningful document structure to be filled by editors, we need some kind of supervisor for the effort. He seems willing to take up this role.

Giovanni