by: Carlos Musich, Luis Garabito Microcontrollers Application Engineers with Freescale.
This application note is intended to demonstrate http client implementation using Freescale MQX RTOS capabilities. The hardware used to illustrate this is the TWR-K60N512-KIT. The remote controlling and monitoring have become a need rather than an option in the embedded world. This application note takes advantage of two social media interfaces for these purposes. One is used to enter commands to the MCU; http://twitter.com/. The other one is used to pull out data from the MCU; https://www.supertweet.net/.
It is important to focus in the fact that with these methods the MCU is reachable through Internet without the need of a public IP address or without mounting a HTTP server in the MCU. The application source code described in this document can be found in the AN4417SW.zip file. For a full description of Freescale MQX RTOS, please visit https://www.freescale.com.
This application defines two tasks in MQX. The first task is main. It is meant to configure GPIO, the RTCS and create the second task. The name of this second task is httpclient. The purpose of this task is to carry out the communication with the Twitter server and read the commands to be executed. To retrieve the input commands, the httpclient task reads them from the last tweet published by a specific Twitter account.
The command then is parsed and executed according to the implementation. The main task enters into an infinite loop where the httpclient is restarted in each loop to allow a cycle behavior for reading commands. The time for each loop is controlled by a sample rate value that can be configured by the user via a command.
