[time-nuts] Lady Heather on low power CPU/Linux?

Chris Albertson albertson.chris at gmail.com
Wed Feb 22 23:10:01 UTC 2012


On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 2:26 PM, Achim Vollhardt <avollhar at physik.uzh.ch> wrote:
> Fellow Time-Nuts,
> I am trying to run LH on an Alix 3D3 single-board PC:
>
> http://www.pcengines.ch/alix3d3.htm
>
> Being only a 500 MHz Geode CPU, there is not much power to work with. Still,
> running Debian Linux with Wine allowed me to make LH work..
>
> BUT: A single second tick takes about 3-4 seconds to show up.. needless to
> say that LH never catches up again and user interaction is painful at best.
>
> I tried the /tw=50 setting for less CPU usage with little effect. Is there
> anything else I can do?
>
> Strictly speaking, I would only need the active temperature control, I could
> spare all the other features..
>
> Any comments out there?

If I have not just bought one of those $40 Rubidiums I'd be working on
this.  LH could stand to be refactored so it coulld run on low powered
PCs or even an Arduino type micro controller.

My idea was to divide the work over three processes
1) very light weight and only connects the t-bolt information to a
network "socket".  no procesing.  This could run on a uP if needs be.
Written in plain ANSI "C" and very portable

2) and "engine" for calculation and control.  it has no user interface
at all and runs as a background task.  multi-platform
unix/linux/Windows/mac

3) User interface.  Talks to #2 above.   There is no reason why there
can't be several of these each with a different "look"  could be
native or even a web page.

I really don't like having to run Windows just for this lone program
and even then the screen design and over all user interface is
primitive, even by Windows standards

The way forward, if I get to this before some one else does is to
start with small funtionality in each of the three programs, perhaps
just temperature monitorring.   Then later maybe expend the graphics
to use OpenGL or to implement logging with SQLite

Chris Albertson
Redondo Beach, California




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