NUREMBERG, GERMANY -- March 14, 2017 -- eCosCentric Limited, the eCos^® experts, today announced the upcoming release of the eCosPro^® real-time operating system to the Raspberry Pi^® family of maker, educational and prototyping boards. eCosPro delivers deterministic, real-time performance on the Raspberry Pi 3, Pi 2, Pi 1, Pi Zero and Pi Zero Wireless boards, as well as the Pi Compute Modules 1 and 3.

"eCosPro provides a small footprint real-time operating system environment ideal for time critical control systems. Used with the ultra low cost Raspberry Pi range of single board computers it provides cost effective full feature performance ideal for IoT and M2M applications", said Jack Lang, Co-founder Raspberry Pi and member of the Board at eCosCentric.

Since their launch, the Raspberry Pi models have brought low-cost, feature-rich and expandable hardware to the market which has captured the imagination of makers, educators and designers. The diverse range of readily available expansion cards and accessories can be used as building blocks to swiftly turn hardware concepts into working prototypes.

eCosPro eases the transition between prototyping on Raspberry Pi boards to deployment of the final embedded product. It enables embedded applications to be swiftly moved to hardware based around Pi Compute Modules, or ported to more specialised custom hardware designs. This might include lower cost, highly integrated designs based on Cortex-M class SoCs; or designs that require more flexibility in terms of memory and peripherals, form factor, environmental rating, power consumption, performance and so forth.

As well as architectural ports of eCosPro to the Cortex-A53, Cortex-A7 and ARM11 based Broadcom SoCs, drivers are written for key peripherals, including UART, GPIO, I2C, SPI, SD, Ethernet & WiFi. eCosCentric's USB host and device stacks bring simple connectivity to the platform, without the need to license additional third-party stacks. eCosPro's Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) support has been extended to the quad-core Cortex-A53 based Raspberry Pi 3 series, as well as the quad-core Cortex-A7 powered Raspberry Pi 2 models. With its real-time features, depth of device coverage and breadth of support across the range of boards, eCosCentric are confident that eCosPro will be the most comprehensive RTOS offering available for the Raspberry Pi.

Embedded developers are provided with a productive, conventional cross development environment, available for both Linux and Windows hosts. C and C++ applications are configured, built and debugged using eCosPro's Eclipse-based development environment. eCosCentric's Eclipse plugins provide a direct connection to the Raspberry Pi target during development via JTAG-based hardware debug, or alternatively, over a serial channel using the RedBoot debug agent running on the Raspberry Pi.

In contrast to general purpose operating systems for the Raspberry Pi, eCosPro is a light-weight multi-threaded real-time operating system, delivering reduced latency with bounded response times. eCosPro's resource requirements are a fraction of those demanded by a desktop/general purpose OS, maximising the RAM resources available to applications. Direct boot from SD card provides an instant-on capability enabling embedded applications to be responsive within milliseconds. eCos is portable across a wide range of embedded architectures and microcontrollers, so applications prototyped using eCosPro on Raspberry Pi can be readily ported to other targets.

Visit eCosCentric's Stand (161) in Hall 4 at Embedded World this week to see a live demonstration of digital signage, built with commodity hardware, using eCosPro running on the Raspberry Pi Zero Wireless.

eCosPro Starter Kits for Raspberry Pi will be made available in Q2 2018, free-of-charge for non-commercial use. For the latest details and to register your interest see the eCosPro Raspberry Pi page.

About eCosPro

eCosPro is a stable, fully tested and supported version of the eCos open source real-time operating system and RedBoot bootstrap firmware. The eCosPro Developer's Kit is a distribution of eCosPro with commercial support & advice, prebuilt eCos host tools, compiler tool chains, full documentation, Eclipse-based integrated development environment to streamline eCos application development, C++ runtime (including Standard Template Library) as well as profiling, code coverage and memory allocation debugging tools. Middleware components qualified with eCosPro include a Java virtual machine, an in-memory database, graphical user interfaces, security libraries, CANopen and USB compliant host & device stacks and flash file systems.

For further details visit http://www.ecoscentric.com/ecospro.shtml or contact eCosCentric.

About eCosCentric

Founded in April 2002, eCosCentric is the leading provider of eCos support, training, development and consulting services worldwide. Staffed by the original eCos creators and highly experienced embedded system and software engineers, eCosCentric provides complete solutions consisting of run-time systems, complementary host tools and certified third party applications.

eCos, eCosCentric and eCosPro are registered trademarks of eCosCentric Limited. Raspberry Pi is a registered trademark of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. ARM and Cortex are registered trademarks of ARM Limited (or its subsidiaries) in the EU and/or elsewhere. All rights reserved. All other company or product names mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.