The C printf function is a staple of embedded development. It’s a simple way to get logs or debug statements off the system and into a terminal on the host. This article explores the various ways to get printf on Cortex-M microcontrollers.

Using an RTOS is often a tradeoff between the ease of decomposing tasks, with the complexity of the scheduler itself. There exists a middle ground between highly complex systems that may require an RTOS, and simpler ones that can be easily modeled using a super loop.Since ARM is the most popular embedded CPU and almost every ARM processor has a hardware scheduler, it would be interesting to make a compact framework utilizing these features.