Computer Solutions Ltd

After supplying all your Embedded Development Tool needs for 42 years
Computer Solutions Ltd and its web shop are now closed.

Having reached the grand old age of 75 it is time to relax and fulfil other ambitions.

Its been an exciting ride with you, our customers, often on the bleeding edge of technology
and I thank you for your friendship, your trust, and your orders.

Stay well I wish you all success in your future projects.

Chris Stephens.

But what to do with the web site ? It has taken >12 man years of work to create a repository of knowledge on many aspects of the art and science of embedded microprocessor development and even after closing the shop it still gets over 4,000 visitors per month. So as a service to my customers I have decide to keep it live providing my technical insights on the products and then redirecting viewers to sites where they can purchase the items they used to buy from us. Follow the link "Home"

The "Information zone" consists of articles produced as background tutorials on subjects of interest to those designing new products. As different CPUs have became available this has lead to new development techniques and in particular to new ways of communicating between nodes.

Home

Information Zone

Real-Time Executives

A Real-Time Executive (RTX) allows tasks, which are pieces of code that do specific duties, to run "quasi-concurrently". This means that these tasks will seem to all run at the same time, and the system will appear to be doing many jobs simultaneously. The major advantage of this is that now the programmer may consider each task or sub system independently of the others, modularising and simplifying the design. The RTX then provides facilities for tasks to start and stop other tasks or to allow tasks to interact.

A number of solutions are available to suit different requirements.

CMX-RTX

Available for a large number of CPU families from 8 to 32 bits CMX is written in C but with the scheduler and interrupt handling optimised to each particular family. Full source code is included. This is a very comprehensive and efficient executive with optional task debug and TCP/IP stacks available for even small 8 bit systems.

Keil

Keil provide basic RTX facilities with their high end products for both ARM and 8051