Helium is a minimalistic real-time kernel for the HC(S)08 core by Freescale and Atmel AVR.

On the HC(S)08, its kernel uses less than 900 bytes of memory, and the scheduling routines are very responsive. A context switch requires 125 clock cycles (15.6 μs @ 8MHz).

Helium was developed using the CodeWarrior IDE from Freescale which is available here. AVR Studio from Atmel is available here.

Visit the Helium Users' Group on Yahoo to post questions and find answers to common problems (created 8-11-2008).

A commercial version of Helium for the ColdFire is available through Control Engineering Solutions, which will choose several projects to receive free copies before its official release. To have your project chosen, just fill out a form on the Control Engineering Solutions website. The pre-release notice for Helium 2.0 may be found here.