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Charles Springer
Mar 27, 2012, 1:14:40 AM3/27/12
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Hi all.
This is a we bit off topic but relates to the time period of the Cat, or earlier. I had been ignoring the Arduino crowd mostly because of the inane toy applications - make LEDs blink that are sewn to your clothes for example. However, I sell some ARM7 boards that are Arduino compatible (and a zillion times faster) and finally bought a couple of Arduino Pro boards as references.
I started doing a little programing then looking at the optimizations in the compilers to make the most use of the very small RAM and flash. I must say, despite the abomination of requiring GCC for AVR to compile anything and the heresy of C pointers. I started to rather enjoy the good old byte counting and little tricks to save a few here and one there. It has been a long time since I used memory without a K, M, or G after its numerical size. Plus, a lot of the Arduino "shield" boards are poorly designed with a lot of room for improvement. You can read the comments on Sparkfun.com and see that they pretty much ignore problems with their designs despite them being 2 layers and about 3 square inches and having their own pick and place machines. The same is true for a lot of the code libraries. It reminds me a lot of the early microprocessor movement and most of the new users know less about electronics and computing than the hackers of the 1970's. The are mostly in the "What's a diode?" stage but with exposure to Python and PHP.
Anyway, this is just a heads up. The Arduinos are pretty cool and you can do a lot with them. They are nice and slow at 8 or 16MHz yet respond to interrrupts much faster than a 500MHz ARM running Linux (without special handlers. The ARM FIQ is nearly instant if needed but has to run outside the Linux). For about $20 you can hang one on anything that needs hard real-time. Now I'm pinin for the Fiorth.
-- Charlie Springer
This is a we bit off topic but relates to the time period of the Cat, or earlier. I had been ignoring the Arduino crowd mostly because of the inane toy applications - make LEDs blink that are sewn to your clothes for example. However, I sell some ARM7 boards that are Arduino compatible (and a zillion times faster) and finally bought a couple of Arduino Pro boards as references.
I started doing a little programing then looking at the optimizations in the compilers to make the most use of the very small RAM and flash. I must say, despite the abomination of requiring GCC for AVR to compile anything and the heresy of C pointers. I started to rather enjoy the good old byte counting and little tricks to save a few here and one there. It has been a long time since I used memory without a K, M, or G after its numerical size. Plus, a lot of the Arduino "shield" boards are poorly designed with a lot of room for improvement. You can read the comments on Sparkfun.com and see that they pretty much ignore problems with their designs despite them being 2 layers and about 3 square inches and having their own pick and place machines. The same is true for a lot of the code libraries. It reminds me a lot of the early microprocessor movement and most of the new users know less about electronics and computing than the hackers of the 1970's. The are mostly in the "What's a diode?" stage but with exposure to Python and PHP.
Anyway, this is just a heads up. The Arduinos are pretty cool and you can do a lot with them. They are nice and slow at 8 or 16MHz yet respond to interrrupts much faster than a 500MHz ARM running Linux (without special handlers. The ARM FIQ is nearly instant if needed but has to run outside the Linux). For about $20 you can hang one on anything that needs hard real-time. Now I'm pinin for the Fiorth.
-- Charlie Springer
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