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The central idea underlying an RTOS with a fixed-priority scheduler is that a high-priority task should be scheduled ahead of one with lower priority. Yet, as a developer you have to watch out for programming pitfalls that can result in inverted priorities.

Richard Barry, the founder of FreeRTOS, gave a presentation on the future of FreeRTOS earlier this spring. He followed FreeRTOS to Amazon Web Services where he still oversees the project, and he could confirm that it is one healthy open source product.

Percepio sponsors several Student Racing Car teams with Tracealyzer licenses, mostly in Europe but today we present our first North American team: Purdue Electric Racing.

The Argentinian Air Force has developed a microsatellite, called µSAT-3. And Tracealyzer plays a small but important part in this national satellite project.

Last week Percepio released Tracealyzer version 4.3 with many new features, such as a state machine detail view, stack usage analysis and data export. You will also see major performance improvement when working with very large traces.

In this post we are going to dive deeper into Device Firmware Monitor and explain what it takes to set it up and how it can be used in a typical IoT application.

Are you using Tracealyzer today but find yourself wishing that we should have added that special missing feature? We hear you: over the next few months we are going to enable embedded and IoT developers to do many things themselves, without having to wait for new releases of Tracealyzer.

One of the many free academic licenses for Tracealyzer that Percepio has handed out this year went to Charles Sommer, research engineer on the AAReST project at Caltech in Pasadena, California. AAReST aims to construct a telescope that can be sent up in space in pieces and then assemble itself in orbit.

We have good news for the growing crowd of embedded Linux developers: the next step on the Tracealyzer 4 roadmap is proper support for Linux tracing, complete with live visualization and many other great features.

Computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra once said, “Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence”. No matter how much developers test their software, they just cannot prove that there are no bugs left.

In a previous post on the AWS Partner blog, Percepio CEO Johan Kraft showed how to get started with AWS IoT Core and Amazon FreeRTOS on the NXP OM40007 IoT kit using Percepio Tracealyzer for debugging support. This week, Johan is back with a follow-up, How to Solve Tricky Embedded IoT Challenges with Insightful Analysis, where [...]

Percepio has announced Percepio Device Firmware Monitor (DFM), a ground-breaking new cloud service for IoT product organizations that provides awareness of missed bugs and speeds up resolution.

Percepio sponsors several Formula Student Racing Car teams with Tracealyzer licenses. Today, we meet the High Speed team from Karlsruhe who specialises in building combustion engine cars.

Percepio sponsor several Formula Student Racing Car teams with Tracealyzer licenses. Today, we have caught up with team Revolve from Trondheim, Norway, to hear about their thoughts, and their experiences with Tracealyzer.

Percepio sponsor several Formula Student Racing Car teams with Tracealyzer licenses. We caught up with three of them and thought we'd share their thoughts, and their experiences with Tracealyzer. Here is the first team. Running Snail from Germany.

Tiny sensor devices are key elements in IoT systems, and they need to be as energy efficient as possible. Roberto Rodriguez-Zurrunero has successfully used Tracealyzer in his research to both minimise energy consumption and fine-tune timing.

Percepio has just released Tracealyzer 4 for one more RTOS platform: On Time RTOS-32. We build upon the tracing library included in RTOS-32, which enables users to trace kernel operations such as scheduling, task communication and interrupts. If you use Tracealyzer with RTOS-32 today, contact your nearest distributor or drop a mail to sales@percepio.com to [...]

This fall, a team of dedicated students at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway, sets out to construct a driverless electric car. It is the eighth iteration of the school’s Revolve project and the first one that Percepio sponsors.

The cool thing about studying in Kiruna, Sweden's northernmost city, is that you may get to blast stuff into space on a rocket. The city is home to Esrange, a vast commercial and research rocket range, and the local technical university takes advantage of that with a menu of suitable courses, with names like "Spacecraft [...]

India, Norway, France … there has been a flurry of interest around Percepio’s free academic Tracealyzer licenses lately. End of summer and beginning of the fall semester probably plays a role here, as does our announcement a few weeks ago. One of the free licenses was awarded to Anil Joseph, student at the Birla Institute [...]

Percepio has its roots in academia, Mälardalens Högskola in Västerås, Sweden, to be precise, and we have long supported both technical universities and their students with heavily discounted Tracealyzer licenses. Today we are taking this to the next level with the launch of a completely free site license for qualifying schools. "The embedded community has [...]

When Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched their IoT platform Amazon FreeRTOS last November, Percepio was one of four launch partners presented on stage. This week AWS published an article about AWS IoT development using Amazon FreeRTOS, Percepio Tracealyzer and the NXP OM40007 IoT kit, written by Percepio CEO and founder Johan Kraft. "Tracing Amazon FreeRTOS [...]

When debugging or profiling your firmware, it is often important to trace Interrupt Service Routines (ISRs) such as timer interrupts or interrupts from communication interfaces. However, using a classic ”printf” call is typically not an option since it may increase the execution time of the ISR by orders of magnitude. The integrated ”exception trace” support [...]

Tomorrow Friday is a special day here at Percepio HQ – we're moving offices. We are not moving very far, the new office is a ten-minute walk from our current one, but it is absolutely a step up for the company. We'll have our own offices with plenty of space to grow (and we are [...]

I (Mike) was travelling to Barcelona for the RISC-V Workshop earlier this month. As I walked through the Barcelona airport I looked up and saw some big ass fans. I took a quick picture, enlarged the logo, and sure enough – it really was a Big Ass Fan! It's always cool to see a Tracealyzer customer's [...]

Percepio's Senior Drone Builder and Support Engineer Niclas Lindblom with his Embedded World drone. We knew we had to have something special. We knew we were going to show Tracealyzer 4 at Embedded World 2018, and we wanted the world to take notice – it was after all the largest improvement in at [...]

Percepio has released Tracealyzer version 4.1 with support for Micrium µC/OS-III. We have also added support for RTOS tracing via Arm's ITM interface (Instrumentation Trace Macrocell), that allows very fast streaming of software trace data with low overhead. “Tracealyzer 4 is such a massive improvement over previous versions and as we have been working closely [...]

You may have heard about the General Data Protection Regulation, better known as GDPR, which is the new regulatory framework for managing personal data of European Union citizens; it comes into force on 25 May, 2018. Since Percepio is based in Sweden, which is a member of the European Union, and have a lot of [...]

When you open a trace in Tracealyzer, it usually opens to the vertical timeline. This view, which shows all activity in the system, is in many ways the core of Tracealyzer and most of the other views link back to the timeline, but with its massive amount of information it is not always the best [...]

We have talked about it for six months, and worked on it for much longer than that, but today it is finally here - Tracealyzer 4! Starting today, you can download the new version of Percepio's powerful visualization tool and try it out for yourself. If you use Tracealyzer today, the first thing you will [...]

In collaboration with Cypress Semiconductors, Percepio Tracealyzer® now supports Cypress PSoC® MCUs, including the hardware profiler unit in the new PSoC® 6 family. Percepio Application Note PA-019 describes in detail how to get started with Tracealyzer on Cypress PSoC® MCUs and Cypress PSoC Creator. The example is for PSoC 6, Cypress' most recent MCU family, but except for [...]

We are happy to announce improved Tracealyzer support for Microchip MPLAB X IDE, allowing for tracing of additional RTOSes. The updated MPLAB plugin now supports Micrium µC/OS-III and SafeRTOS, in addition to the previous FreeRTOS support. The plugin has also been updated and verified for the latest version of MPLAB X IDE (v4.0.5). The plugin saves [...]

It's that time of year again – late December in Sweden means snow (mostly) and darkness (always), but it also means that the Christmas holiday is coming. Most of our staff will go on a well-deserved vacation break next week, so expect that it may take a little longer than usual for us to respond to [...]

November was a good month for Percepio and Tracealyzer. We saw record sales, a lot of interest in the Tracealyzer 4 preview videos and everything culminated on the 29th with the release of Tracealyzer v3.3 supporting Amazon FreeRTOS, just released by Amazon Web Services along with several new IoT offerings. We believe Amazon Web Services has taken [...]

Amazon Web Services launched their own RTOS yesterday, as part of a major improvement of its IoT offerings. We're happy to announce that Tracealyzer version 3.3, which we released yesterday, fully supports Amazon FreeRTOS, the new IoT microcontroller operating system from Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS and Percepio have collaborated to provide Tracealyzer support for [...]

This is our third preview video of Tracealyzer 4, due out early next year, and this time we focus on two entirely new features: State Graphs and Intervals. Both features allow you to customize the visualization and analysis for your own system and the issue at hand. State Graphs can be created automatically from your trace, [...]

Welcome to a second glimpse of Tracealyzer 4, showing how network activity can be visualized together with the RTOS events. This way, developers of connected IoT systems can get a wider perspective of their system's real-time behavior. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1O4AE4TEbE In this brief example we display events from a TCP/IP stack, but the same technique can be used [...]

A completely revamped user interface and a much improved live view are two of the most prominent features of the upcoming Tracealyzer 4, which we showed for the first time at Arm TechCon last week. If you weren't there, you can still get a feel for the new product through a short video we have put together. [...]

Tracealyzer v3.2 adds powerful filtering functions to reduce the amount of data that must be sent to the monitoring host computer. This makes Tracealyzer applicable to a wider range of development setups. Today we are happy to present version 3.2 of Tracealyzer for FreeRTOS. The new version is available for download from percepio.com/download/ immediately. [...]

By Niclas Lindblom, Senior FAE at Percepio AB. Percepio has recently introduced Tracealyzer for ThreadX, which is good news for developers using Renesas Synergy. As you might know, the Renesas Synergy Software Package (SSP) includes the ThreadX RTOS and middleware from Express Logic, supporting Synergy S1, S3, S5 and S7 processors. Tracealyzer is a runtime [...]

Niclas Lindblom Sr. FAE at Percepio Not that long-ago, developers thought that a high-level language was not really needed when building embedded applications. Writing a good UART driver in assembler was done in only a day or two, so why bother with C? Besides, even if you wrote in C, who could trust that [...]

Niclas Lindblom Sr. FAE at Percepio As you might know, our Tracealyzer tools allows you to record and visualize the real-time behavior of your RTOS-based firmware. In previous blogs, I’ve talked about the possibility of streaming the trace data from your board, and today we’ll consider one such specific case - USB CDC. A few months [...]

Last month at Embedded Conference Scandinavia, Percepio founder Dr. Johan Kraft made a very well received presentation called "Common RTOS-related bugs – How to Avoid and Detect". The presentation covered RTOS basics, the motivations and challenges of using an RTOS, then dived into specific RTOS-related problems - their symptoms, how to avoid them and means [...]