John Kasunich wrote: > On Mon, 23 Aug 2010 22:25 -0500, "Jon Elson" <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> James Louis wrote: >> >>> This past CNC Workshop in Ann Arbor, Michigan had a small touchscreen >>> EMC2 controller on display at the Pico Systems booth. It used an >>> interface called "Touchy" and might be just what you're looking for, >>> but it is not released yet. >>> I liked it a lot. >>> >>> >> Not really all there yet. There are apparently about 5 touch screens >> that have been set up for the Beagle Board, most of them cost more than >> the Beagle. There is no real time RTAI package yet for the Beagle >> board, hopefully soon. Then, EMC2 has to be ported to the Beagle, >> hopefully that will not be a big deal, but it is a different >> architecture (non-X86) so there could be surprises. >> > > Jon's reply is confusing. The original question had nothing to do with > the Beagle board - it was simply about touchscreens and the Touchy GUI > for EMC. Touchy is working, available, and released as a standard part > of EMC version 2.4 (the current version). > OK, my reply didn't include all the history, as I have been working with James on a project of theirs. It was supposed to have a Beagle Board, but due to the delays in getting RTAI on the OMAP ARM architecture, we are now looking at using an Atom board. This is about the same price, but 10 X the volume and requires some additional pieces to be integrated (Beagle has an SD card slot and integral memory, Atom requires memory cards and hopefully can boot off USB memory stick). The Atom is also literally 10 X the power of the Beagle (~30 W vs 3 W). But, we could build an Atom-based system today, with no porting effort.
So, all that context made my reply a LOT more specific than it might have been. I don't consider the Gateway Profile 3 with a magic Touch panel to be "small" in the context of this project. We were hoping to make a 2-3 axis CNC control that you could literally hold in one hand while poking the touch screen with your other hand. This isn't going to be possible with the Atom, but it can still be pretty small. Certainly, Touchy is not at all the development hurdle, and I was not in any way trying to imply that! The hurdle is all about the Beagle Board, and that really has no bearing on EMC2. Porting to a different hardware architecture is always a major effort, and is not really necessary as long as suitable motherboards with parallel ports are available. Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sell apps to millions through the Intel(R) Atom(Tm) Developer Program Be part of this innovative community and reach millions of netbook users worldwide. Take advantage of special opportunities to increase revenue and speed time-to-market. Join now, and jumpstart your future. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-atom-d2d _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
