This document is intended to help students get started with the real-time systems (RTS) assignment. We will start on the assignment together in the laboratory. Students will then complete the assignment, and analyse real-time design aspects (e.g. threads, mutexes, deadlocks etc), as per the original 2011 instructions, in their own time, and hand in the report by the due date.    

Instructions
1.  Download the following items from the course website, under the "RTS Resources" section, to a working folder:

a)  "Practical Assignment" - linked to the "RTS_practial_assignment_2011sp1.pdf" document.

b)  "Source code for practical assignment" - linked to "RTS_practical_1_2011sp1.zip"

c)  "Patch for practical assignment" - linked to "RTS_practical_1_2012_patch.zip"

2.  Unzip the downloaded files in the working folder.

3.  Start Microsoft Visual Studio (2010 professional is used here). Students are encouraged to familiarise themselves with this, popular, powerful, flexible and developer-friendly tool. Visit the online MSDN Developer Center for help.  

4.   (Left) Click on "New Project ..." on the start page.

5.  Make a new Visual C++ Win32 Console Application named "RTS_prac" in your working folder.

a)  Under application settings, check the "Empty Project" option.

6.  From within the Solution Explorer,  
a)  Right click on Header Files and add the two .h files downloaded to the "RTS_practical_1_2011sp1" directory ("Existing Items").

b)  Right click on Source Files and add the two .c files downloaded to the "RTS_practical_1_2011sp1" directory ("Existing Items").

7.  Each .c file contains its own main() function. Comment out all source code in the file that you do not want to use.

8.  We now need to add the POSIX functionality, provided by a 3rd party. Source code is freely available, but it is not necessary for what we would like to do here. We can just link our project with the built code.