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Staff

Examiner and lecturer: Jan Jonsson

Lab responsible: Sven Knutsson

Laboratory assistants: Emil Lindqvist, Andreas Wieden, Mattias Åkesson, Leo Anttila

Detailed contact information can be found here.

Organization

The course encompasses lectures, exercise sessions and a laboratory assignment.

The lectures aim at introducing fundamental theories and concepts as well as a programming paradigm, and demonstrating how theory and paradigm are applied.

The exercise sessions focus on the specific topics covered during the main lectures. At each session, selected parts of the course contents are highlighted, and problems from the exercise compendium are demonstrated. The remaining time is for discussing solutions to the demonstrated problems or the laboratory assignment.

In the laboratory assignment each student group should implement the software for an embedded real-time application running on stand-alone hardware system, that should later be interconnected by a bus network and perform a collective task. The laboratory sessions start in study week 2. At the end of the course the students present their project at a seminar and document it in a written report.

A current, and detailed, schedule for the activities mentioned above can be found on the schedule page.

Within the framework of the laboratory assignment, in collaboration with English (LSP580), the course will include training in oral and written proficiency.

Aim and content

This course will give a general introduction to small embedded and distributed real-time systems. It will provide experience of some important applications for microcomputer systems, training in C-program development for small real-time systems consisting among other things of nodes connected to a CAN bus.

After the course the students shall be able to:

• Describe and understand the concepts of embedded system, process, parallel processes, shared resourced and distributed systems.
• Explain the concepts of critical regions, mutual exclusion, starvation, deadlock and synchronizing of processes.
• Describe and understand the general structure of, and the function of, a real-time kernel for small embedded system.
• Develop programs composed of multiple processes, for small systems with support of a real-time kernel.
• Explain the meaning of, and the differences between, the concepts of static respective dynamic scheduling.
• Apply schedulability analysis on small systems composed of several well-specified processes with timing constraints (period and deadline).
• Describe the general structure and characteristics of the CAN protocol.
• Develop programs for a distributed real-time system consisting of nodes connected to a CAN-bus.

The following concepts will be described in different levels in the course: process, process communications, critical regions, semaphores, mutual exclusion and synchronizations, deadlock, memory management, timing constraints ("soft/hard" systems), scheduling, time- and event-trigged systems,schedulability analysis for systems with static and dynamic process priorities, distributed real-time systems and data communications for small embedded real-time embedded systems.

The course describes the implementation of a small real-time kernel for a microcomputer system. The course also includes use of arrays and stacks
in C-programs in connection with exercises and studies of a real time kernel.

A laboratory assignment and a final laboratory report gives experience of software development for embedded systems.

Important Dates

Examination

The student is evaluated through a final written exam (5 hec) and a compulsory laboratory assignment (2.5 hec).

An approved laboratory assignment and passing the written exam yields a final grade (scale is U, 3, 4, 5).

Permitted aids at the written exam are the compendium J. Nordlander: Programming with the TinyTimber kernel and a Chalmers-approved calculator.

Additional information regarding the written exam can be found here.

Additional information regarding the laboratory assignment can be found here.

Your progress regarding the different examination objectives can be viewed in PingPong.

Course literature

 

(KMP)		Realtidssystem för högskolans ingenjörsutbildningar. R. Johansson & R. Snedsbøl, 2004. ISBN: 91-89280-21-0. Can be purchased at Kokboken.
(LEC)		Lecture notes. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers, 2016. Can be downloaded from the lectures and exercises pages.
(EXC)		Exercise compendium. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers, 2012. Can be downloaded from the resource page.
(LAB)		Development tools and tutorials related to the laboratory assignment. Can be downloaded from the resource page.

Course Evaluation

One way that you can contribute to improving the quality and contents of your education is to participate in the course evaluation process. If you have comments or suggestions for improvements regarding the course please contact one of the student representatives listed below.

Minutes from mid-quarter course evaluation meeting can be found here.

Read more about the course evaluation process at Chalmers here.