Case Study
RTOS Migration for an Industrial Control Panel
A building-automation OEM’s control panel firmware had grown out of a bare-metal codebase over several product generations. Adding new I/O modules meant hand-tuning interrupt timing each time, and a subtle priority-inversion bug was causing occasional control-loop overruns in the field.
We migrated the codebase onto FreeRTOS, restructuring drivers around a proper task and priority model with interrupt-safe queuing, and added memory protection to isolate the modules most likely to be extended. Real-time performance was profiled under worst-case I/O load before sign-off.
Control-loop jitter dropped from over 800 microseconds to under 50 microseconds under full load, and bring-up time for each new I/O module fell from roughly 3 weeks to 4 days. The update shipped as a firmware-only revision across the existing installed hardware, with no board respin required.
