Did you know that Pumpkin also develops and sells a unique RTOS that is targeted for MCUs with small memory footprints? All of Pumpkin Space's microcontroller-based modules utilize a Microchip PIC24E MCU, with Salvo as the foundational RTOS. In these applications, Salvo enables event-driven, priority-based tasks to run on the MCU in a highly decoupled manner.

Pumpkin is not the only Salvo RTOS user -- today we received an email from a company whose products you are likely to see when visiting a large world-wide fast food chain:

Salvo is still great, in no uncertain terms, for our application on dsPIC it's been a God-send. We build 40,000 dsPIC33
boards a year, and at present 35,000 ship with Salvo running on them. Harold F.

While there is a learning curve associated with learning an RTOS, once learned, the benefits of the structure that the RTOS brings to an application are substantial. And a carefully-crafted RTOS like Salvo can easily be configured to have  zero impact (yes, zero!) on the real-time responsiveness of the application.

In 2009-2011, Pumpkin developed and delivered a series of twelve 3U-sized CubeSats to the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) -- these were the Colony I buses. These 3U CubeSat-size buses had fixed and deployable panels, a full 3-axis ADACS with coarse sun sensors and a magnetometer, an 8051-based C&DH processor, multiple batteries and over 1000cc of payload volume. The NRO distributed Colony I buses to various organizations ranging from the Naval Research Lab (NRL, with their QbXI & QbXII CubeSats) to USC's ISI, with its Aeneas CubeSat. 

Sometime in the not-too-distant future, one of thousands of Pumpkin SUPERNOVAs is likely to fall back to Earth. Some time will pass, and someone will find it, in a field, resting, its payload long gone, and yet seemingly unscathed due to its robust construction.

Almost unscathed -- if you look closely, one of the SAP cover screws (made from 18-8 SST) burned up on rentry, and the -ZA1 SAP cover has worked itself loose ...