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Pi Zero or C.H.I.P?

Thing is, under the hood it's still a hyper-elaborate 32-bit RISC architecture with three instruction sets, pipelines, caching, I think maybe even SIMD and an MMU? It's like trying to find a fun little project car and for some reason Craigslist only has dozens upon dozens of M1 Abrams tanks listed. Sure, for some reason they're selling them for $5 apiece, and in a certain sense that's a terrific deal, but sometimes all a guy wants is a little Volkswagen, y'know?
 
Mmm, so what would you consider to be a suitable platform?

Yes, I understand, when even the simplest MCUs are USB and ethernet enabled, it's kind of hard to remember that you only needed a screwdriver.

I feel the same way when shopping for appliances.
 
http://www.up-board.org/ is an alternative to both of these that is worth watching. Shipments are supposed to start in April. My advice is to avoid ARM-based SoCs and go with PC compatible x86 ones instead if you can as they're simply more mature.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Mmm, so what would you consider to be a suitable platform?
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Hmm, I guess I'm not certain. The main thing is that it would be nice to have something simple enough to easily understand - a CPU that doesn't require six pages of setup code to get all its fancy features into a consistent state, something like a 6502 or an 8086 or something, and some basic I/O hardware that can be comprehended easily with a short list of registers and functions. Something like the FIGnition would probably be perfect if it were a little less constrained - more RAM and better video generation, for instance.
 
cthulhu said:
http://www.up-board.org/ is an alternative to both of these that is worth watching. Shipments are supposed to start in April. My advice is to avoid ARM-based SoCs and go with PC compatible x86 ones instead if you can as they're simply more mature.
Click to expand...

I'm not certain. If you look at that board, it's not simple either and probably is more than what CJ wants.

Parallax still produces things like the BASIC Stamp and the Propeller; not exactly low-cost, but understandable.

ARM-based devices are exploding in popularity in consumer devices, so one might as well go with the flow. As far as architectures, I like the PIC32 MCUs, as the architecture (basically a MIPS R4000 CPU) is quite mature and the selection of features is pretty liberal. But there are lots of choices, depending on applications. For example, the TI MSP430 is easy to understand from an architectural standpoint.
 
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NavSpark-mini + UART-to-USB Adapter $0

NavSpark-mini + UART-to-USB Adapter $0

cthulhu said:
http://www.up-board.org/ is an alternative to both of these that is worth watching. Shipments are supposed to start in April. My advice is to avoid ARM-based SoCs and go with PC compatible x86 ones instead if you can as they're simply more mature.
Click to expand...

Zero dollars for the board, shipping $10 to $20

NavSpark-mini is a 32bit Arduino-compatible controller with 1MByte Flash + 212KByte SRAM + FPU + GPS. It is functionally equivalent to the larger NavSpark but without the USB interface and fewer I/O pins.

http://navspark.mybigcommerce.com/navspark-mini-uart-to-usb-adapter/

Overkill with the GPS or not?
 
Depends on what you want it for. There are scads of variants on Arduino-compatible shields. The AVRs, ARMs, PIC32 can all be found in the variation.

Most have available IDEs that are source-compatible with the original Arduino IDE. But usually, in doing so, you give up a lot native flexibility of the host MCU--and by sticking with the Arduino IDE, you really don't get to learn the workings of the host MCU. So I have mixed emotions about that.

I do have an old Digilent Uno32 if anyone wants to fool with this stuff.
 
cthulhu said:
http://www.up-board.org/ is an alternative to both of these that is worth watching. Shipments are supposed to start in April. My advice is to avoid ARM-based SoCs and go with PC compatible x86 ones instead if you can as they're simply more mature.
Click to expand...
Nothing against x86-based boards, but why would they be more mature? AFAIK SoCs started with ARM, and a long time before there were any x86-based SoC boards.
 
Tor said:
Nothing against x86-based boards, but why would they be more mature? AFAIK SoCs started with ARM, and a long time before there were any x86-based SoC boards.
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I've got nothing against ARM SoCs in theory but none of them have firmware support for ACPI as far as I know. I don't think Device Tree is an adequate substitute for ACPI. Also, ARM-based SoCs tend to have peripherals of lower quality than either Intel's or AMD's offerings, such as the broken USB controller in the Broadcom BCM2835 and BCM2836 SoCs as used in the various Raspberry Pis and the flawed Gigabit Ethernet controller in the Freescale/NXP i.MX6 SoCs.
 
External controllers I can definitely agree with. I'll just have to compare my old Samsung notebook with Broadcom and Realtek with my new NEC laptop which is all Intel. In the latter everything Just Works, with no issues.
 
I'm having a bit of difficulty following the reasoning here. Is CJ talking about getting a PC going or does he want to deal with small embedded systems? The latter are usually far simpler than the former. In other words, with no software present on the system, how long does it take to get to a "Hello World" program?
 
I think the discussion may have taken a turn away from my particular gripe (which wasn't the original topic in the first place, anyway.) But what I was talking about was something about on the level of an '80s home computer, but in a Pi-like form factor, so that you could get some of the niftiness (particularly in not having to hook it up to a TV, and being able to use an SD card for storage) but with more of an orientation towards low-level tinkering than Yet Another Embedded Linux.
 
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