While doing my due diligence for this project, I've looked into several different real-time o/s' for the embedded devices. Plausibly, one might say that an entire O/S is overkill for this solution, but the fact is, I don't have a great amount of time to devote to debugging all of the software components required for an entire software ecosystem to handle interrupts, radio control, tcp/ip stack, etc. I suppose I could go for a total minimalist approach and roll my own vis-a-vis utilizing a collection of libraries and a small state machine, but I'd like to avoid re-inventing the wheel if at all possible. Doing a little bit of digging, and I found Free RTOS(http://www.freertos.org), which seems to be perfectly suited for the application at hand, especially since its already ported for the ARM Cortex processor. I'll be downloading it in the coming weeks (had planned on doing it this weekend, but my "day job" takes precedence) to have a look at the code to see what I'm dealing with. It appears that they have a free tcp/ip stack available, so this may be a workable solution. uCLinux is way too heavyweight in my opinion, for this project.
I definitely like the idea of having a true RTOS running on the device, so that time sensitive activities such as checking the nutrient Ph/TDS, temperature and humidity monitoring, etc. can be easily accomplished with a small amount of code that ultimately hooks into a very simple REST API.
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