Ask Slashdot: Best Dedicated Low Power Embedded Dev System Choice? 183
An anonymous reader writes "I'm a Solaris user which is not well supported by the OSS toolchains. I'd like to have a dedicated Linux based dev system which has good support for ARM, MSP430 and other MCU lines and draws very little (5-10 watts max) power. The Beaglebone Black has been suggested. Is there a better choice? This would only be used for software development and testing for embedded systems."
UDOO (Score:5, Informative)
Check out the UDOO: http://www.udoo.org/ [udoo.org]
A pretty capable machine at a decent price and low power draw. Yes more than a Raspberry PI, but multi cores and real USB controller is worth it (at least for my realtime audio needs).
Weird question, but... (Score:3)
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I'd say 'esoteric' is an apt adjective for Solaris.
You're guilty of what you're accusing the grandparent for.
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I'd hesitate calling a quadcore intel system 'incredibly cheap' - but that aside.
In some cases, power can be rather more costly than that.
For example, I did some simulations using accurate local solar data here in Scotland, and if I want a system that works 24*7, with storage to back it up, it comes out to around $200/W initial capital, and maybe $20/W ongoing (battery replacement), or $.90/kWh equivalent.
Assuming a 10 year life, that doubles it to $1.8/kWh.
Or $15 per watt your device uses, per year, amorti
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It depends on your application space. If you're making a monitor to alert you when plants need to be watered, you're going to want to use a controller that can run on AA batteries for months, and costs a few dollars. That's not anything that Intel sells - that's more like an Arduino Atemel chip. So yes, compared to a high end CPU, a low end Intel CPU is cheap and low power, but compared to a $3 controller that can run on an AA battery for months, it's expensive and power hungry.
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The problem domain isn't "monitoring plants with only an AA battery for power" though. It's a host capable of running Linux and assorted toolchains for embedded software development. I know that there are systems for all kinds of applications and the power envelopes they prescribe. That's not the issue. The issue is that someone proclaimed that "electricity is expensive. Douche bag." And that's not true. Electricity is cheap. Cheaper than hardware which is incredibly cheap itself. And that holds true even for the very low end, where a tiny amount of energy is sold in an expensive package, but a finished system will still cost more than the batteries it takes to run it for a couple of years before it is replaced, yet the hardware is sold at prices which almost make the devices disposable. For perspective: How many smartphones does the average person buy per year? Still think a low to mid range quad core desktop system is expensive?
So I do development and I want to cut my costs down. I presently have a desktop at home with a 600W supply and a server with a 250W supply, as well as laptops with 60-90W supplies. As I use the desktop for other things (e.g playing DVDs, Netflix, etc.) I'm satisfied to leave it for now; laptops might get replaced by tablets or chromebooks.
But the server? I keep it on a UPS, and would love to be able to keep it up for a very long time. On the UPS it would only get between 10-30 minutes if power fails (APC
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*Probably to test how code performs under such low power conditions?*
not really. he's developing for mcu's. not for the system itself, so that has no point.
for it to be portable, it would need to have some other stuff.. like a monitor, keyboard and other stuff all which take power. now he might be doing it under solar power at his cottage or yacht or whatever.. but then kind of still would be needing the monitor and other peripheals.
basically the answer is just buy a friggin netbook. even if you need to hav
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naw - read TFS again; xie's devving for Solaris. Good luck getting Solaris running on a pi/bone/whatever.
Maybe you should read TFS again instead since the submitter clearly states that they want a dedicated *Linux* based dev platform. There's no mention of running Solaris on it.
The display will draw more power than the CPU (Score:3)
Any display big enough for development will draw more power than the CPU. (Although I suppose you could kludge some non-backlit e-reader into being a dev system.)
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No need for a second display. Just ssh -X develsystem and have everything display on the Solaris machine.
Board with a Display System or without? (Score:2)
One of the cool things about the Beaglebone Black and the Raspberry Pi is that they've got GPUs powerful enough to drive an HDMI display, and give you 1080p graphics if you make sure there's enough electric power and not too much interference (my RPi was a bit wonky on the last display I tried), so you can drive a decent monitor for programming or use it as a TV video player.
But if you don't need that, because you're doing X windows or just doing a bunch of ssh terminal sessions, you've got more potential c
Solaris not well supported by OSS toolchain (Score:3)
It's my understanding that "install a bunch of gnu tools" is the first thing that many Solaris sysadmins do on a new system.
Anyway, why do you need a low-power ARM system? The description heading mentions "embedded", but your description mentions irrelevant stuff like Solaris, but not the important stuff like what sort of embedded work you'll be doing: industrial control, point-of-sale, sensor monitoring, etc, etc ad nauseum.
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Simple native development can be a lot easier than cross development.
If you have the money for some really good embedded tools, cross development is not bad at all. But if not native development is a lot simpler.
I would still do most of my work on an X86 Linux box and then move the project over to the embedded for testing but that is just me.
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Its not really that much more complicated. I do cross dev at work, but at home I had a crossdev setup for a handheld gaming machine we were porting linux to up and running in under 30min. Its really not that hard to just specify a target on a different host. This is all gcc as well, you dont need money for good embedded tools
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One word.
Debugger.
Compilers are actually easy to come by today. Debugging is where you run into issues.
Re:Solaris not well supported by OSS toolchain (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably because about 99.99% of questions such as this one play out like this:
"I need a hammer. What is a good hammer?"
"Why do you need a hammer?"
"I need a hammer to chop down trees."
"No, you need an axe."
They don't even allow questions like this on stackexchange because they're so open ended and worthless that they serve no purpose and provide no value (other than to instigate arguments such as this or flameboy arguments such as Home Depot hammers versus Lowe's hammers). I can tell you've never dealt with customers and requirements management, because understanding why customers need something is extremely important: it may lead to a better product for the customer or new products for more/new customers. Lastly, you must be new to the internet if you go around assuming anyone knows shit (especially on Slashdot).
Re:Solaris not well supported by OSS toolchain (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do people always as WHY someone wants something?!
Excellent question, young Padawan.
People often ask for help, assuming an answer and thus embedding it in the question. The experienced helper asks probing questions to see what the asker really wants, and then asks that question. When you're older, you'll understand.
In this case specifically, embedded development typically requires specific "non-consumer" I/O requirements that little hobbyist systems just don't support. Thus, saying BeagleBoard or Udoo or RaspberryPi would steer him wrong.
OTOH, maybe he just doesn't know WTF "embedded" really means and is just tossing out the buzzword du jure, when a used laptop would serve his needs much better.
So, we ask probing questions.
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Re:Solaris not well supported by OSS toolchain (Score:5, Insightful)
but when I'm asking about some detail
Can you really not figure out that the solution to such a problem is to add more detail to your question, indicating what you've already researched?
Methinks more people should read "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way".
http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#beprecise [catb.org]
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Vampires don't figure, they just suck.
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Can you really not figure out that the solution to such a problem is to add more detail to your question, indicating what you've already researched?
It really isn't.
.NET library developer to specify a type contract that included a non-default constructor with a specific prototype/signature. Now for some this may sound like an Interface, but others will argue that Interfaces should not specify implementation details and they (rightly or wrongly) include constructor prototypes as an implementation detail and argue that this is why interfaces should not (and do
A ran into a fine example of why you are wrong just last week.
I was looking for a way for a
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Which once again returns us to the basic questions being asked by the would be helpers: "What are you trying to accomplish?"
Its stated quite specifically already so when you then go and ask that, you are of course doing exactly what I said you would do, proving my initial response that it really isn't helpful to describe in excruciating detail what is being tried.
The important specifics are already there: I need my generic class library to enforce a constructor contract on 3rd party code that calls my library.
Maybe you imagine that there isnt a need for it, but thats just proving the GPPP's point also.. that you think you k
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It's possible the person asking a question knows their stuff. It's possible. But we don't know that, which is why we ask probing questions.
Day 1, you ask: "Have you tried to [blah blah] your [woo hoo]?"
Day 2, you ask "Have you gotten all the latest [goo mo]?""
Finally day 4 or 5 comes around and you finally
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Can you really not figure out that the solution to such a problem is to add more detail to your question, indicating what you've already researched?
Let's say you want to develop a 3D game that has to work in all the absolutely most crusty computers that can be found. Then you want go with OpenGL 1.x and the fixed function pipeline. Just observe all the whining that appears. How you should use shaders, and how even shader-based OpenGL 2.x is not sufficient but for some academic reasons you want at least 3.x because it has the core profiles, so that even accidentally you won't be using any legacy functionality. Even despite the fact that games like Angry
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How you should use shaders...
"My hands are tied. Even though I want to use OpenGL 3.x, I can't. The specs say OpenGL 1. So, can you help me with OpenGL 1 or not?"
I was a programmer, and now I'm a DBA. When I ask for help, people understand that -- for example -- when I say "the machine runs SQL Server 2008R2" that there's zero chance of upgrading to v2012 or v2014 just to solve one itsy problem: there's too much effort involved in QAing a huge production environment.
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Because this never works.
What happens instead is that people latch on to some irrelevant detail in your context and the discussion gets instantly derailed in that direction, thus ensuring that your question never gets answered. It's particularly fatal to mention motive, because that's completely subjective. The only way to actually get useful answers to questions these days is to trim the context as ruthlessly as you possibly can.
One day someone needs to write a "How To Answer Questions The Smart Way".
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What happens instead is that people latch on to some irrelevant detail in your context
Maybe I just work in an area of IT where such Aspergers jerks are minimal.
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I find it incredibly annoying when someone THINKS they have researched some topic and knows what they are doing.
You may be perfectly right and capable and interested only in the detail that you're asking, but unfortunately you'd be in the minority. probing questions will confirm everyone is on the same page and while it may be annoying to you, it will be a godsend for many others.
Engineers in general are terrible at solving generic problems, which is ironic because we're thought of as the great problem solv
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Yeah. People are asking questions because HIS questions are, when taken together, nonsensical.
He's looking for a good host machine to do development for ARM, MSP430, and other MCU embedded targets.
When doing embedded development, there is usually a very clear distinction between "target" and "host" - it is rare in the embedded world for people to use a device as both host and target (since the target is usually pretty weak CPU-wise), but he's implying that he wants to use a device that is usually a target
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Try developing for an MSP430 on the MSP430... hence the distinction between 'target' and 'host'. When you can develop on the target, great. But a lot of these MCUs don't have the IOPS/RAM to run a generic scripting language, never mind a compiler.
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An MSP430 has idle currents measured in uA, and a chip costs in the region of $1.50, with no external components required. BBB isn't useful in applications that require running off of a watch battery for a year, and isn't cheap enough to consider adding as an additional component in consumer electronics.
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So either he has VERY special unique requirements that he hasn't clearly communicated,
Why is low power consumption a special, unique requirement? All of my computer equipment was chosen and/or assembled with low consumption in mind. My Desktop's TDP is under 350W and I can play games at 1920x1200, albeit not with everything turned on any more. I have a small fleet of netbooks for performing long-running tasks or for traveling, I sold an HP EliteBook and bought three of them. I even took an EEE 701 4GB running Jolicloud on a six-week vacation to Panama. My most power-hungry portable has two c
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For all we know this guy does development work inside his van and wants to drain the battery as slowly as possible.
Asking "why" is often a pretty good question, because you can't tell from the very first question that the person actually knows their needs, or indeed knows what they fuck they are doing at all. Development on embedded systems is slow, the processors are slow. Is the poster willing to put up with slow compile times compared to a laptop?
I saw online a person who was asking how to design a power
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They want a low wattage test system for doing embedded dev. Period. Don't skirt around it, don't try to poke and make fun of anything he says in the comment, either you can't help him or you can. MOVE ON.
The person doesn't really provide a power budget. Low power compared to what?
Are we talking a device that's going to need to run off of battery power for hours or days? Are we talking about a device that's going to be silent (no cooling fan)? Are we talking about a device that can have a cooling fan as long as it delivers good performance per watt? Who knows, the question doesn't specify.
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I'd tell him to stop watching Kevin Smith movies and leave it at that.
CPU cores and clock speed matter. (Score:1)
Alright, I've been working on getting a build server setup on a BeagleBone Black that I had lying around. The ARM->x86_64 compiler I had to build so the executables could run elsewhere was a pain, so be careful about that. Also, the speed at which it compiles is "dog" slow. It reminds me of the stories I used to hear from old programmers about turning in their punch cards and waiting a day to get an answer back. It's not that bad, but it is slower. nohup quickly becomes your best friend. If it sounds lik
toolchain (Score:2)
thats what a toolchain and cross compile is for. nobody compiles android on an android phone. HOW DID THEY COMPILE FIRST ANDROID PHONE? HOW IS BABBY FOREMED?
Best <insert-x-here> (Score:5, Funny)
Emacs! Oh wait, wrong flame war..
Re:Best (Score:1)
That's vi, you insensitive clod!
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vim is where it's at.
Re:Best (Score:2)
The Bears.
Intel NUC (Score:4, Insightful)
I would look into an Intel NUC.
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For embedded intel - a better match may be the new minnowboard max.
http://www.minnowboard.org/mee... [minnowboard.org] $99 - shipping real soon now, preorderable.
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Celeron J1800 and J1900 boards are passively cooled, low power and cheap. Consider them as an alternative to a NUC
I bought this board:
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/celeron/X10/X10SBA.cfm
It's more expensive than the ASUS, Gigabyte, etc J1800 boards but mine does 12V dc-dc conversion on board and has many more SATA connections. That sames me a traditional PSU and SATA card/expander.
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The one with quad core 22nm Atom (named Celeron N2820 or N2830) should be great and is cheap and low power. Dangerously cheap too!
Probably higher perf/watt than cell phone and tablet ARM.
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Zotac is currently bringing passively cooled quad core mini Intel boxes to market (the low end NUC has a fan but doesn't really need it under normal load). The Zotac ci320 nano looks particularly nice: Celeron n2930 (quad core, 1.8GHz) with a thermal design power of 7.5W and an even lower scenario design power. It offers a much better interface selection than the NUC: plenty of USB3 ports, display port, HDMI, eSATA, (shared SATA and mSATA inside). Costs about the same as the low end NUC.
The NUC allegedly ha
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Oh right, it's the Celeron J1900 (sold on standalone ITX boards) that was quad core.
Buy a netbook (Score:4, Informative)
You can get a netbook that will draw around 5-10W. If you get one with intel cpu and chipset you will have the advantage of massive compatibility, especially if you skip the original Atom chip. Once the dual cores came out it was pretty well abandoned by everyone.
That, or get one of these ~$100 android units which also runs Debian. But I don't really recommend that. The only one which seems very performant and yet inexpensive is the mk908 which is a bit of a turd reliability-wise and which doesn't yet have complete hardware support, e.g. http://www.cnx-software.com/20... [cnx-software.com]
I stand by the netbook
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I got a dual core atom netbook for around 60 bucks, bumped it up to 2 gig of ram, and slapped a 32gig SSD in it, runs a couple days on a battery charge and in total have about 125$ into it thanks to ebay
its a good choice
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It seemed to me like netbooks stagnated pretty badly... These days, a Chromebook with crouton installed on an SD card makes for a GREAT Linux laptop.
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It seemed to me like netbooks stagnated pretty badly...
So what? A dual-core atom is actually pretty snappy. I personally have a crufty single-core atom, that is quite pathetic and I wouldn't suggest it to anyone. What I actually use for a 'netbook' is a Gateway LT3103u with the L110 chucked for an L310. Since Gateway finally released windows 7 x64 drivers and a BIOS with AMD-V it blew the hacks wide open. I haven't done a custom DSDT yet (though I should) but I do have SATA running in AHCI mode, necessary for automatic TRIM support. That took a hacked BIOS, but
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Nope, but a chromebook gives 2GB of ram.
Yes, and so do many netbooks. My Acer Aspire One D250 only came with 1GB, as did my EEE 701, but those are old. My LT31 came with 2GB. I upgraded the dimm to get lower-latency memory, mostly to speed up the integrated graphics. Most of the machines that will support 1GB will support 2GB and some of them will even take a 4GB SODIMM, but don't count on it.
Shuttle DS437! (Score:5, Informative)
Do yourself a favor and order a Shuttle DS437, I bought one myself and cannot think of a better little box for playing with embedded systems. Here's why:
It's "only" 1.8Ghz, but we're talking Ivy Bridge here, not some wimpy Atom or ARM core. Plus, in my experience you really want x86 for your host machine. Not every compiler or tool you might want to use is going to be supported on, say, a lower-powered ARM system.
I considered a lot of exotic ARM boards as my development host, including BeagleBone, Jetson-K1, and a handful of others. I think the D437 leads by a wide margin, but for what its worth I considered the Jetson-K1 board a distant runner-up.
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insensitive shuttle (Score:2)
I'm a cosmonaut, you insensitive clod!!
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Looks like you didn't read the question. The inquirer isn't looking for an ARM system: The specification is for a low power system which runs Linux so that it will support the toolchains for ARM and other common embedded CPU architectures. The Shuttle DS437 runs Linux, as described by Ravyne. Idle power consumption certainly fits the desired envelope of 5-10W. It's a little more under load, but you get vastly more processing power in return for that, and the widest support of developer tools available. Ther
you can do TI in oss (Score:2)
but I wont shed a tear for you when you have to jump though your 20th hoop
TBH the msp's are not NEARLY as bad as their arm based devices, where you will have more console windows up than lines of code
PcDuino (Score:1)
http://pcduino.com/ [pcduino.com]
I have a raspberry Pi, Beagle Bone Black and PcDuino.
Raspberry PI: don't like the fact that you have to boot off the sd card.
BBB - no complaints, nice board and has an optional display that's pretty nice
PcDuino - my favorite, more memory and flash than the other 2 devices and the v3s is in a really nice case.
The Pi and BBB lack a decent case (from what i can find)
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I have a Pi and a PcDuino v2 and the PcDuino is definitely more capable and doesn't cost all that much more. The Arduino compatbility and WiFi are nice, as is having enough flash on board to boot without an SD card, although I generally use one since they are faster. I use their LinkSprite shield for prototyping things, since it breaks out the IO pins into a nice connector for easy use.
The Differentiators are SoC Peripherals... (Score:2)
The ARM architecture has some fairly good Linux support and wide adoption.
One of my favorites out there today is the A10-OLinuXino-LIME This is a low cost 1GHz ARM board with a Mali-400 GPU, a SATA port, 100BT port, two USB ports for under $50. I'm a big fan of the SATA port... using a SSD for the system solves many reliability problems. It also has support for LIPO battery but I haven't tried it.
Perhaps the best value/performance is the Wandboard QUAD. Quad iM.6 with 2GB Ram, WiFi, SATA, and an OpenCL
A10-OLinuXino-LIME and BBB are both Cortex-A8 (Score:2)
Just to be clear, the A10-OLinuXino-LIME, BeagleBone white and BeagleBone Black all contain a single Cortex-A8 core, and the TI AM3359 runs at the same 1GHz speed in the BBB as the Allwinner A10 does in the LIME.
The original BeagleBone (white) ran its AM3359 at 720MHz so its CPU performance is a bit less, but the BeagleBon
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Why ? (Score:2)
Not quite sure if I'm following ... (Score:2)
A simple, cheap small notebook computer should be able to do this.
Last post! (Score:1)
The correct answer starts with raspberry and smells like pie.
linux on ARM (Score:1)
To answer the question (Score:2)
Look at the Olimex range of boards.
I've been using these for a year or two and found them to fit the bill nicely.
There are single and dual core boards, with / without embedded flash memory (or micro-SD card slots) and they'll run Debian (or other) Linux They have a lot on on board peripherals and pinouts for their own range of LCD screens - though I use an HDMI monitor for simplicity. The power supply will accept anything from 6 - 16 Volts from a phone-charger type PSU and you can even plug in a LiPo for
Baytrail-D boards? (Score:2)
Olimex boards. (Score:2)
Far more OI, better all the way around.
https://www.olimex.com/Product... [olimex.com]
RDP (Score:1)
Atmel SAMA5D3x (Score:2)
This is a new chip with a ARM Cortex-A5 core, making it directly compatible with all distributions with an 'armhf' port like Debian, Ubuntu or Linaro.I like the fact that it is compatible with the Arduino Due connector. It's probably the easiest Linux based Arduino hardware compatible board.
http://www.at91.com/getting-st... [at91.com]
http://www.atmel.ch/tools/ATSA... [atmel.ch]
http://www.at91.com/linux4sam/... [at91.com]
That makes no sense. (Score:2)
Don't try to use super-low-power things for software development. Get something that will run things quickly and efficiently, and turn it off when you're not using it.
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Even an old 100 watt laptop will compile your code many times faster than something like the Black or Ras Pi will. A gig of RAM and swap space, something that embedded systems don't normally have, will make a huge difference. Just throw a small SSD (or boot from USB stick) in an old 2-code i3 with a crap graphics card, and what your code compile faster than a 5 watt embedded device will even launch your IDE or get through the first source code file.
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We don't know what the OP is attempting to compile. It might be just some code to run inside the Arduino bootloader, or it might be a whole muLinux and a local GCC for the target. Heck, the Debian distro for the BBB might not have a binary for the target muC, which means compiling GCC before compiling the code (worst case). There is also the possibility of OPs chips not being supported in GCC. For example, I just picked up some Cypress PSoC boards; the tools for them are only available right now on Windows.
AllWinner Mele set-top boxes (Score:2)
There's a good dozen or more configurations for the hardware.
There's guides on the internet to installing different versions of Linux on it. (Unless you want to do Android dev)
I bought the A1000 version and a laptop HD (plugs in the top).
Then I installed Debian (using an online guide) and MiniDLNA. I use it as a media server for my TV.
You got what you need (Score:1)
You want 5-10 Watt max.
You have Beaglebone Black.
That works with 5V. 1A is recommended. That makes it a 5W device.
Most of similar embedded devices have same requirements. just look for functionnalities/ports you need and test/use it.
Technologic Systems (Score:2)
The embedded ARM boards from Technologic Systems [embeddedarm.com] are worth looking at also. I used a TS-7260 with a large enough SD card to install Debian with gcc and it worked great. It booted nearly instantly and consumed something like 100mA of current at 3.3V IIRC. It was quite a robust little box. There are newer and faster models than the TS-7260 at the link I provided above.
Technologic Systems (Score:2)
I just checked and they state that the TS-7260 draws half a watt minimum and 2W typical... I seem to recall it drawing even less than that though. Perhaps it was 200mA @ 3.3V which would fit within their spec.
A list of all boards in the market (Score:1)
Use separate machines for development and testing. (Score:1)
I am developing a system targeted to run on a wandboard (www.wandboard.org), which is a really good "embedded" system similar to the BeagleBoard, but uses a Freescale iMX6 A9 Arm processor and is available in single, dual & quad core CPUs with 512MB to 2 GB RAM.
However, even with the quad core 2GB ram version, builds take a really long time, so I use a regular PC that I built using a new Haswell CPU, 16GB ram and a 240GB SSD to do development and even unit testing. I can make several changes, build ever
Wait: Cortex A15 (Score:3)
Don't buy anything today. Wait until there are media boxes with quad Cortex A15/A17 chips and buy one of them. They'll be out any week now. Rockchip RK3288 is coming, should be affordable, and the company is spending a lot of effort making sure it's well supported in mainline.
Cortex A9 hails from 2007. It's ancient. The GPUs are at best old Mali-400's. The compute/watt is not-great.
If you want to go really low power- if battery life is your concern and you don't actually have serious CPU use (you mention MSP430, so it sounds like you don't have real CPU use needs) get a Cortex A7 or Cortex A5. There are dozens of dual core Allwinner A7 boards out there. A5 has slimmer pickings, but will get you pleasantly below the one watt range, and the boards come with more embedded targeted peripherals that might not be included on media devices.
Don't count on good OSS support (Score:2)
"Rockchip RK3288 is coming, should be affordable, and the company is spending a lot of effort making sure it's well supported in mainline."
Citation needed. Mind supporting your statement with a link? AFAIK RK has one of the poorest FOSS support among Chinese SOC makers (compared to Allwinner and Amlogic). The RK source code floating in the net tend to be "leaks" or in any case releases that aren't official supported by the company. Also for a long time there was no official way to flash firmware onto the em
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Its page implicitly but strongly says it's for people who register as a CUDA developer.
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What's more Virtualbox is made by the same vendor that makes Solaris and using it is a piece of cake..
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It's a tool vendor, not a target, issue. (Score:2)
But you see you are in the Windows CE embedded niche. Your vision is clouded.
I'm not in a "windows CE embedded" niche and the grandparent poster is right.
It's not an issue with the target. It's an issue with the platform(s) supported by the development tool vendors and the chip manufacturers.
For instance: With Bluetooth 4.0 / Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), two of the premier system-on-a-chip product families are from Texas Instruments and Nordic Semiconductors.
TI developed their software in IAR's proprietary
It has nothing to do with the target. (Score:2)
What about consumer electronics (washing machines, microwaves, smartphones, routers, AP's) or critical industrial systems
where I would image RTOS to be necessary (VxWorks, QNX) ? I can't imagine Windows CE dominating in those spaces.
You seem to be missing something here.
We're not talking about the target. We're talking anout the platform on which the program for the target is built.
This is where the editors, version control system, compilers, linkers, profilers, prom burners, in-circuit emulators, etc. are
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