This technical lecture presents how Toradex built a balancing robot demo application using the new i.MX 7's heterogeneous asymmetric architecture. i.MX 7 features a secondary Cortex-M4, which can be used for real-time or low-power applications. We will discuss how to make use of the secondary core with a FreeRTOS based firmware implementing the closed loop controller to keep the robot balanced upright. On the powerful main CPU complex, a dual Cortex-A7, Linux is running a Qt based user interface. We will go into details about the rpmsg/OpenAMP based messaging offerings provided by NXP. The robot demo application makes use of rpmsg to communicate between the two independently running processor cores and operating systems.
