Re: rtos development
One of the best books on how an RTOS works is "uC/OS II" by J. Labrosse. There is a new edition "uC/OS III" that comes with an evaluation board so you can start playing right away.
Otherwise, I suggest looking for tutorials on Internet. There are plenty but it is hard to start without some guidance.
FreeRTOS may also be a choice -- not very simple for beginners but well supported by its community.
Look for QP (Quantum Platform) to see a different approach to real-time programming (author Miro Samek) -- he has written a number of books and articles on real-time programming as well.
Another good book is "Patterns for Time-Triggered Embedded Systems" by Michael J. Pont. As far as I know, his book is free -- see
http://www.tte-systems.com/books/pttes. Look for TTE Systems on Internet -- see all their downloads and tutorials at
http://www.tte-systems.com/downloads/. The author has another good book for beginners "Programming Embedded Systems" that includes a chapter about writing an embedded OS (very simple but very useful tutorial).
Another good place to start is Cheap Threads (
**broken link removed**).
Protothreads are extremely lightweight stackless threads designed for severely memory constrained systems, such as small embedded systems or wireless sensor network nodes -- see
http://www.sics.se/~adam/pt/.
And you may visit my blog that I just started at
http://polisoftdesign.com/blog. I will try to offer some advice and answer questions as my time will permit.