After a decade of dedicated effort, RT-Thread has grown into one of the largest embedded open source communities in China. It is now widely adopted across various industries such as energy, automotive, healthcare, and consumer electronics. With thousands of deployments, it has become the most mature and stable open-source RTOS developed by Chinese engineers.
As more developers join the RT-Thread ecosystem, they often face common challenges: How can they effectively learn RT-Thread? In response, the founder of RT-Thread, Xiong Peixiang, shared his insights on the five essential steps to learning RT-Thread (for more details, see: *RT-Thread Founder Xiong Peixiang: Four Steps to Effectively Learn RT-Thread*).
First, it's crucial to have a solid foundation in C programming. Next, finding a development board to start with is highly recommended. Once you're set up, being able to run the basic kernel along with the shell is an important milestone. Then, solving classic problems like the producer-consumer and dining philosophers will deepen your understanding. Finally, gaining knowledge about the components of RT-Thread will help you use it more effectively.
In addition to mastering the C language, having a development board is essential for learning RT-Thread. Choosing the right hardware can sometimes be challenging. To address this, RT-Thread has introduced a series of hardware platforms, including ART_WiFi, RT-IoTCamera, RealBoard4088, and STM32 Internet Radio. Now, RT-Thread is launching its "RT-Thread Inside" strategy — offering open development platform authorization and collaborating with 100,000 hardware partners. As part of this initiative, the first RT-Inside development board, the iBox IoT Development Kit, has been launched.
The iBox IoT Development Kit is maintained by a large community of hardware teams and will provide RT-Thread migration support and related examples for the iBox platform. This kit is designed to be a versatile platform for IoT applications, capable of functioning both as a gateway and a terminal device.
Here are the key specifications of the iBox IoT Development Kit:
- Powered by an STM32 microcontroller in an LQFP package
- Supports 12V DC and PoE power supply
- Uplink ports include Wi-Fi, GPRS, and Ethernet (compatible with NB-IoT modules)
- Downstream ports support Lora (SPI, UART) and RS485
- Features two standard relay output circuits, digital input detection, ADC, and DAC
- Can function as both an IoT gateway and a terminal device
This powerful and flexible development board is ideal for developers looking to explore and build IoT solutions using RT-Thread.
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