[time-nuts] single board PCs

[Attila Kinali]

On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 06:11:59 -0800
Jim Lux <jimlux at earthlink.net> wrote:

> It's sort of the upscale version of the Arduino, PIC, MSP430 thing. I'm 
> looking for a building block that I can just drop in, hook up, and not 
> worry too much about.

If you don't mind to be stuck on linux and *bsd, i would recomend
the beagleboard, beaglebone, pandaboard family. Nice, low power things.
Relatively cheap (for what you get), good support. And if you ask the
right guy at TI you even get one for free.

The beaglebone is a bit special on this list. It's not meant as an
all in one solution, but rather as a building block for more complex
stuff that is put ontop of it using so called "capes" (like Arduino+shields).
Though you can already do quite a bit of stuff with the beaglebone alone.

For all of them you get premade ubuntu, angström and android images,
but rolling your own linux (e.g. using buildroot) is a piece of cake
(getting buildroot configured and set up for a pandaboard is something
like half a day, including reading the documentation, starting from
zero knowledge)

Actually, once you have something like buildroot set up, it's pretty
easy to get linux running on any embedded system that uses a similar
processor. Just change the cpu and board type in the kernel config.
Compile again. Build your SD Card and you are done.

Eg. you can also try the OlinuXino from Olimex, which are damn cheap.
(and unlike the Raspberry Pi they are completely documented and you
don't need any binary only drivers). I haven't tried any of those yet
(didn't have the time), but my past experience with Olimex is very good
(their Arm7 and Cortex-M3 boards are our main prototyping system) and
so far all the questions i had about the boards were either answered
by the available documentation or by a quick email.


As for processing power, the pandaboard is probably the most powerfull
with an dual-core 1.2GHz processor. But even the smaller OlinuXino with it's
i.MX233 that runs IIRC up to 450MHz, you can do more than just a little
bit of number crunching.

			Attila Kinali

-- 
The trouble with you, Shev, is you don't say anything until you've saved
up a whole truckload of damned heavy brick arguments and then you dump
them all out and never look at the bleeding body mangled beneath the heap
		-- Tirin, The Dispossessed, U. Le Guin