Recommendations for inexpensive platform?

Hello, I’d like to get freeRTOS up and running but do not have a hardware platform. Can someone tell me what would be the cheapest and easiest hardware platform to start with? I have a MacBook Pro on which to do development and I have Windows installed. Thank you. Richard

Recommendations for inexpensive platform?

The cheapest would be to just simulate FreeRTOS. This can be done using MPLAB from Microchip. MPLAB will simulate PIC24 and dsPIC FreeRTOS programs, but not PIC32 programs. I think the Explorer16 hardware is quite low cost too but I don’t know for sure. If you can stretch to $60 or $70 then you can get a Luminary Micro board and use the KickStart version of the IAR tools which is free for programs up to 32K. You can also use Eclipse with GCC which is completely free but can be a bit fiddly to set up.

Recommendations for inexpensive platform?

Can you solder? If you can, then why not try a PIC24 processor? I’ve just built a circuit on veroboard, and with the processor costing about 5USD, the whole circuit will cost less than 10. You will need a PIC programmer ( I’m using a PICKIT2, which can be purchased for around 20USD ) Mike