How to add FreeRTOS task ("thread") to any PlatformIO project

Most PlatformIO default configurations already have FreeRTOS enabled - they just don’t use it.

In order to start a new FreeRTOS “thread” (called task in FreeRTOS-speak), first add these includes:

#include <freertos/FreeRTOS.h>
#include <freertos/task.h>

Now add the task function and handle:

TaskHandle_t myTaskHandle;
void MyTask( void * parameter )
{
    for(;;)
    {
       // TODO Task code goes here
    }
    // if you ever exit the loop, this is here to clean up the resources
    vTaskDelete( NULL );
}

then start the task using this code once, for example in your main function:

// Start MyTask thread
xTaskCreate(
    MyTask, // Task function
    "MyTask", // Name
    10000, // Stack size
    NULL, // Parameter
    1, // Priority
    &myTaskHandle);

Also see our new post on how to use xTaskCreateStatic() to use statically allocated instead of dynamically allocated stack memory for the task: FreeRTOS task with static stack memory (xTaskCreateStatic) example