Yes I worked on old computers too. Back in the 1980's even on high-end Sun workstations I used to get up and get some coffee while the C compiler compiled by code.
You can't say "It is good enough because things were even worse 40 years ago." Today I am 20 times more productive and can write software that was impossible before If in the late 1990s if you have told me to write a program the accepted digital photos and sorted them into piles of cat-photos and dog-photos I'd have wasted a ton of time then given up. Today such a program is an introductory student exercise. On Sun, Dec 13, 2020 at 11:24 AM John Dammeyer <jo...@autoartisans.com> wrote: > > > > From: Chris Albertson [mailto:albertson.ch...@gmail.com] > > > > I don't call it a problem. With the three board designs, you can make a > > replacement for one of the "wings". splitting it up makes the design of > > each really easy. And as said PCBs this size cost under $1 each even in > > tiny quantity. So what I see you have here is the start of a family of > > boards. > > > > My problem with this is that I think the Beagle board is grossly > > underpowered. It is OK if you are making a battery-powered, portable > > milling machine but if you have access to AC mains power why use a > beagle? > > > > Chris, I think you just made my case for me. It's not so much that the > Beagle is underpowered with the two co-processors. It's that the OS and > system has exploded in size and inefficiency because the developers are > always running the latest and greatest development systems. Way back a > Pentium-33 had no trouble running EMACs and a Pentium-33 was way slower > than a BBB. > > And we've allowed this inefficiency to happen without complaint. I have a > Panasonic Blu-ray player. Always bugged me that it took so long after the > power switch was pressed before it responded to the button to open the > drawer. It had no trouble immediately scrolling a message on the display > telling me it was powering up. Turns out it's running Linux. So a 20 > second start up time is considered permissible even though it's rude to the > user. > > The BBB with Replicape and OctoPrint can sit in the connecting state for > quite some time while it explores all the serial ports at two different > baud rates before it finds the BBB. Or, you can select which serial port > you want to use and it's connected right away. > > How much of MachineKit on a BBB is spent searching for and doing general > stuff that really isn't needed for an embedded system. How much of the > software is written with the idea that there is 4GB to 8GB of 64 bit wide > memory on a system that has 512MB of RAM. That the end user wants to watch > movies and surf the web. > > I used to make fun of IBM PCs with their 8 bit external bus 8088, 640K RAM > and hard drive DOS systems. Running DBASE-II took 5 seconds to get to the > DBASE-II prompt. My 8 bit Z-80 system with 56K bytes RAM and 8" floppy > disks did it in under 2 seconds. > > Yes. Apples and Oranges. Needless to say the PC was more powerful. But > my point is that if the MachineKit port was designed for 64 bit PCs with > even just 1GB RAM and fast hard drives the likelihood of it being efficient > without a total rewrite on a smaller 32 bit processor with 512MB won't > happen. > > So I'll throw up the question. Is as you said, "the Beagle board is > grossly underpowered", or has LinuxCNC/MachineKit suffered now the same > Code Bloat that Microsoft Windows and Apple have, making the need for > bigger processors with more memory mandatory? > > John > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users > -- Chris Albertson Redondo Beach, California _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
