Best IoT Operating Systems for Windows

Developed in partnership with the world’s leading chip companies over a 15-year period, and now downloaded every 170 seconds, FreeRTOS is a market-leading real-time operating system (RTOS) for microcontrollers and small microprocessors. Distributed freely under the MIT open source license, FreeRTOS includes a kernel and a growing set of IoT libraries suitable for use across all industry sectors. FreeRTOS is built with an emphasis on reliability and ease of use. With proven robustness, tiny footprint, and wide device support, the FreeRTOS kernel is trusted by world-leading companies as the de facto standard for microcontrollers and small microprocessors. With detailed pre-configured demos and Internet of Things (IoT) reference integrations, there is no need to determine how to setup a project. Quickly download, compile, and get to market faster. Our partner ecosystem provides a breadth of options including community contributions and professional support.

Arm Mbed OS is a free, open-source IoT operating system that includes all the necessary features to develop IoT products. The OS includes everything you need to develop smart, connected products on Arm Cortex-M based hardware, including machine learning capabilities, security, connectivity stacks, an RTOS kernel and drivers for sensors and I/O devices. Arm Mbed OS is designed for the Internet of Things. It is integrated with connectivity, machine learning, networking, and security stacks and is supported with software libraries, development hardware, tutorials and examples. From hardware to the cloud, Mbed OS supports more than 70 silicon, module, cloud, and OEM partners, optimizing your developer choice. By using the Mbed OS API, your application code can remain clean, portable, and simple, while taking advantage of security, communications and machine learning. The integrated solution reduces development cost, time, and risk.

Welcome to the RT-Thread initiative on SourceForge! RT-Thread is a community-led, open-source Real-Time Operating System. It boasts an extensive feature set, compatibility with over 600 ready-to-use software packages and a broad spectrum of components, and supports all mainstream chip architectures. It also includes a proprietary IDE, the RT-Thread Studio, to assist engineers in quickly embarking on embedded and IoT development. Designed with scalability in mind, RT-Thread is a flexible option for various IoT applications, thanks to its Nano version tailored for resource-limited applications. We invite you to join us on this thrilling journey and help shape the future of IoT and RTOS!

Raspberry Pi Imager is the quick and easy way to install Raspberry Pi OS and other operating systems to a microSD card, ready to use with your Raspberry Pi. Watch our 45-second video to learn how to install an operating system using Raspberry Pi Imager. Download and install Raspberry Pi Imager to a computer with an SD card reader. Put the SD card you'll use with your Raspberry Pi into the reader and run Raspberry Pi Imager. Browse a range of operating systems provided by Raspberry Pi and by other organisations, and download them to install manually.

When you develop with Windows, you join our world-wide partner ecosystem across hardware and software solutions, integrations, and services. Experience our continually evolving feature set, and developer friendly tools, for a smooth device-building experience.​​ Windows IoT provides 10-Year OS Lifecycle Support that is guaranteed with no hidden costs​ through our Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC). Windows IoT operating systems support backwards compatibility in line with Microsoft’s application compatibility promise. With Windows IoT you can use Azure services as building blocks to construct customized IoT solutions. Azure provides the industry’s broadest portfolio of cloud services and capabilities according to your needs and with the requirements from your industry. Windows IoT is compatible with any existing device management solution.

At the heart of any embedded OS is a kernel, which provides vital task scheduling and multi-tasking services to ensure that the timing requirements of your application code can be met, even as you regularly update and expand that code with new features. Micrium OS is more than a kernel, though, providing a number of additional modules to help you meet your project’s needs. Micrium OS is provided entirely free of charge for deployment on Silicon Labs EFM32 and EFR32 devices! You can begin adding Micrium’s professional-quality components to your projects today without payment of any licensing fees.

From simple embedded environmental sensors and LED wearables to sophisticated embedded controllers, smart watches, and IoT wireless applications. Implements configurable architecture-specific stack-overflow protection, kernel object and device driver permission tracking, and thread isolation with thread-level memory protection on x86, ARC, and ARM architectures, userspace, and memory domains. For platforms without MMU/MPU and memory constrained devices, supports combining application-specific code with a custom kernel to create a monolithic image that gets loaded and executed on a system’s hardware. Both the application code and kernel code execute in a single shared address space.