Re: Getting started with embedded programming

[Andrew Shvets <andrew.shvets@gmail.com>]

On Saturday, November 25, 2017 at 5:02:22 PM UTC-5, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> On 2017-11-25 22:39, Andrew Shvets wrote:
> 
> > I'd like to get started with embedded programming next year. What 
> > would you recommend for hardware as well as OS? I'm looking to spend
> > no more than $50 for the hardware and this will be used for hobby
> > projects only.
> 
> - What are the inputs (sensors) and outputs (actuators). Peripheral I/O 
> components are usually far more expensive than the board itself
> 
> - What are the controlling cycles you need 100ms, 10ms, 1ms
> 
> - How much computations you plan to have
> 
> - How much memory you need 1GB or more
> 
> - Passive only cooling and power consumption limitations
> 
> - How big and reliable the external storage must be. SD cards are 
> useless for anything except initial booting. You may need eMMC or SSD etc.
> 
> As for the OS, there is little choice. VxWorks is commercial, which 
> leaves you with some Linux. The choice of distribution depends on the 
> support. Some distributions are well supported, others are not. Booting 
> ARM is a great headache. So I would recommend to take the distribution 
> and kernel for which there is a ready-to-use image.
> 
> > Is Raspberry PI my only option or is there something else that you
> > have tried in the past?
> 
> There are better boards than Raspberry Pi, but it depends on what are 
> going to do. E.g. ODROID xu4 is many times faster than Raspberry Pi 3.
> 
> I would recommend to do all developing on a normal PC. The I/O devices 
> can be same, mocked or emulated. Ada is 100% portable. Once everything 
> works you can port to the board.
> 
> -- 
> Regards,
> Dmitry A. Kazakov
> http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de

Thank you for your reply.  Honestly, I don't really have an answer to any of those questions.  At the moment, my biggest project is a simple "Hello World!" application.

Eventually, I would like to make something that can work with input from 3 small digital cameras.  However, that is a way off.