Re: Increased Interest In Ada?

["Tarjei T. Jensen" <tarjei.jensen@kvaerner.com>]

Marin David Condic wrote in message <98inu2$1fr$1@nh.pace.co.uk>...
>Old PCs may have their advantages, but I'd like to see a setup that had
>features this wouldn't necessarily provide. For one thing - just the pure
>"bare board" nature of embedded computing might not be well illustrated by
a
>PC, considering they already have prefabricated solutions to typical
>embedded problems like "How do I actually get code loaded into this board &
>cycling?" For another thing, they don't commonly have things like EEPROM,
>A/D converters & discretes on-board. (You'd like to give students a machine
>that is not what they are typically used to and pose the question "Well,
how
>are you going to solve Problem X when you don't have a disk drive and a
>video monitor available???") You might also want a development kit that
>reflected as much as possible current state-of-the-art hardware. If one
were
>to go to all the trouble of pulling the pieces together, it might be nice
if
>there were commercial spinoffs as well. :-)

Doing this should be a two stage approach. Stage 1 is using off the shelf
hardware like a standard PC. Stage 2 would involve working on an embedded
kit. That way the money last. I don't think embedded intel kits are
particularly cheap. And if you want a kit for everybody then it isn't cheap
anymore.

As for what you can connect to a PC; only your imagination limits you. The
last two issues of Elektor has articles on a DIY PCI card. The card is
available so that you can use it for prototyping. All sorts of things are
possible. Then we have parallell and serial ports, network cards, scsi and
gpib controllers, etc.

Greetings,