Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
Programming a GPS watch (renaud.schleck.free.fr)
44 points by kersny 4325 days ago
1 comments

Interesting. What OS is this running? Linux?
It's an embedded platform, running on this http://www.futurlec.com/STMicro/STM32F103RET6.shtml with at most 512kb flash memory The board contains an additional 1MB memory.

It does very "simple" things and does not need an OS per se: if you look at the source code, it's basically a loop getting GPS pos and dumping them.

For comparison, here is a (incomplete/outdated) list that shows smallest footprint for a Linux system is here this: http://elinux.org/Best_of_Embedded_Linux#Candidates

In other words: way too small to run any sort of modern day OS....(and it would be too power-hungry anyway :-) )

You can use a small real-time operating system, like FreeRTOS [0] even [1] for the small MCUs like STM32F103 (which is ARM Cortex-M3).

[0] - http://www.freertos.org

[1] - http://www.it.uu.se/edu/course/homepage/pins/vt12/assignment...

not on a STM32F103. probably just bit banging everything himself.