I have been musing about my views on IoT gateways, protocols and how to handle message inflow from different forms of “things” in IoT. For a change I wanted to focus on the ingredients of a “thing”. “Things” may or may not be constrained or constrained for different things depending on the context. either case the key ingredient is the operating system. So like windows and linux “things” also need processing ability may be with limited processing food print. So the OS for “things” should appreciate the “constraints” small memory foot print, longer battery life and small processing foot prints.. There are operating systems termed as RTOS (Real time operating system) which are specifically developed for this purpose.
RTOS
Here is a long list of OS developed to suit contained devices/sensors. Each of these come with pros and cons. Among them 3 most popular open source OS are
Fun part is you don’t need to build or buy sensors to starting playing around with these. I believe all of them come with simulators where you can build what you want run/test to get a feel. Then you could buy a device to load it to them. Contiki specially allows you to measure the power usage and so on. Its great to keep a tab of parameters like these while you develop especially when you are developing for constrained environments. I am starting to explore more. After I have played around with these I will write a detailed comparison of features. BTW contiki looks very promising on paper.