And now it’s time to introduce the star of our show… Ladies and gents, the Renesas Synergy Software Package! You can call it the SSP for short. SENSIBLE ME: Um, Prof, rein it in! You’re an IoT app developer, not a master of ceremonies. PRAGMATIC ME: Yeah but Renesas SSP is helping me be more productive and develop better-differentiated apps so I have more time and money to indulge my fantasies. DEFIANT ME: Yeah, so there! Conversation in my head aside, the Renesas SSP is opening up many new opportunities for developers like me. It’s a breeze to download the software (and its companion e 2 studio Integrated Solution Development Environment/ISDE) from the Renesas Synergy Gallery via a simple registration process and quickly get started working with the Synergy Platform . With Renesas SSP and the Synergy Platform, I’ve been spared a lot of hassles that are typical of working with whatever random building blocks I have historically been able to get my hands on – see my previous post on why you should develop using an integrated platform). To speed my app development and yours, Renesas has done even more heavy lifting by integrating and pre-testing the necessary components into the SSP. The components of the SSP are shown in the below block diagram: This week, we’ll focus on ThreadX and XWare components at a high level and save frameworks, libraries, drivers and board support for next time (We’ll also get more granular on ThreadX and XWare components in future articles). ThreadX The ThreadX RTOS is a priority-based, deterministic, multi-tasking real-time kernel from Express Logic that is designed for high-end and graphic-rich applications, as well as deeply embedded products. It provides advanced scheduling, inter-process and inter-thread communication, memory management and a message queue. One of the cool advanced features of ThreadX, preemption-threshold scheduling, is very helpful in improving real-time responsiveness and reducing excessive context switching overhead. Oh, and did I mention that ThreadX has been used in more than 2 billion commercial products? Makes me think of that 1970s Boston song, Peace of Mind. Got it with ThreadX as part of the SSP. XWare Components Rather than sound like a datasheet here, how about we try a more fun way to convey a lot of technical information. Try singing the below to the tune of that old childhood favorite, “Dem Bones.” Or if you’re more contemporary, rap it. Don’t like either idea? Okay, pretend you're an auctioneer. FileX provides a high performance, MS-DOS compatible file system for SSP. USBX Host Mode lets your app talk to USB devices, such as keyboards, printers and Flash disks. USBX Device Mode lets your app chat with Linux/Apple and Windows devices. GUIX lets you create elegant user interfaces using a complete graphical user interface suite. NetX and NetX dual integrated high-performance implementations of TCP/IP protocols into SSP – NetX, a IPv4 capable stack and NetX Duo, a dual stack with IPv4 and IPv6 capability. That’s it for this week. Next time we’ll learn how the Renesas SSP frameworks, drivers and other components abstract us developers from the hardware details and code happily above the AP Live long and profit! Professor_IoT Hot Tip of the Week I told you Renesas was surprisingly good at documentation. Here’s proof. Check out these helpful SSP user manuals for ThreadX, NetX, NetX Duo, GUIX, FileX, USBX host and USBX device (zip file).
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