RIOT hits the sweet spot

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Just wanted to drop a note about how much fun RIOT is to use. I’ve worked with Yocto in the past, dug around in the Linux kernel, and been exposed to FreeRTOS and written many super-loop type embedded applications. All have their places, but man I am really enjoying RIOT! The code base isn’t so big that it becomes impossible for any one person to understand it, yet big enough to provide a lot of utility. I can grep SOME_SYMBOL $(find -type f) and find what I need in short order, if I can’t glean it from the docs. What a great OS to use!

edit: fixed typos

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Hi Joshua,

On Fri, Feb 11, 2022 at 03:35:34PM +0000, Joshua DeWeese via RIOT wrote:

Just wanted to drop a note about how much fun RIOT is to use. I’ve worked with Yocto in the past, dug around and the Linux kernel, and been exposed to FreeRTOS and written many super-loop type embedded applications. All have there places, but man I am really enjoying RIOT! The code base isn’t so big that it becomes impossible for any one person to understand it, yet big enough to provide a lot of utility. I can grep SOME_SYMBOL $(find -type f) and find what I need in short order, if I can glean it from the docs. What a great OS to use!

I’m so happy to read this. Providing a developer friendly OS for IoT devices is exactly what we had in mind and I’m so glad to read that we’re apparently still on track. :slight_smile:

Just one tiny hint: if you cloned the git repository you could shorten and speed up your grep line above by using git grep.

Cheers Oleg

P.S. To the webmasters of riot-os.org: I think we should Joshua’s statement as part of the “user stories” (if he agrees, of course).

printk(“ip6t_hook: happy cracking.\n”); linux-2.6.6/net/ipv6/netfilter/ip6table_filter.c

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Feel free to use my comment. Please note, I fixed some typos. So use the original, not the quoted comment if you do.

Thanks for the tip on git. It’s always great to learn from someone else’s bag of tricks. I pull RIOT in as a git submodule, so I’ll give it a shot.

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Or you can use rg which is both faster to type and faster to execute :wink:

But great to hear, it’s always hard to tell how many actual users we have or if everyone just moved to Zephyr these days :laughing:

Being able to rather easiely track what’s going on is really one of RIOT’s strong suits.

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@enoch247 can you contact me off-list (m.waehlisch@fu-berlin.de) to work on the user story? usually, these stories provide some additional details, see for example RIOT - The friendly Operating System for the Internet of Things

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Hi, just wanted to leave my two cents here as well.

TL;DR – RIOT rocks!

The institute I work on has been developing a nrf52840-based board (codename “pulga”) and the chosen OS was mbed – which proved to be a poor choice. After googling around, I decided to try RIOT, even though I am more used to doing SBC application code than firmware code.

In less than 30 min I had a sample program running on the board. One day later, I had figured out how to do pin mappings and created a new “boards/pulga” directory with all needed configs. At the end of the week, I had ported a full app (lorawan, uart, gps) from mbed to RIOT, which got us cleaner code, faster compiling time, and more stable functionality.

Conclusion: the “friendly” motto is more than justified. Thanks to all who made it possible!

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