This is off the topic of Factor, but are any of you familiar with Erlang? I have wondered if it might be possible to get an Erlang-like multi-processor system running on the 16-bit PIC24. The idea is that a robot would not have one big processor (such as the ARM), but would have multiple small processors (PIC24s). When you have one processor, you typically have a lack of I/O ports. Also, the whole business of prioritizing interrupts becomes complicated and error-prone. Also, those big processors typically have bad interrupt latency because they have so many registers that need to be saved and restored. My idea is to simplify the software by having each PIC24 deal with a specific set of I/O. The main program though, rather than running on a big 32-bit central processor, would be running in distributed fashion on all of the PIC24 processors. The system would be more robust than the central-processor system, because extra PIC24 processors could be added at a fairly late date in the design of the robot. By comparison, if you are using an ARM and it turns out to be too slow, upgrading to a bigger central processor in the middle of the project would be a major hassle. Another point in favor of the PIC24 is that they only costs like $3 apiece. I'm not really sure how much an ARM costs, but I think that it is like an order of magnitude more expensive.
This is all just a pipe-dream right now, but that is my vision for robotic software. Do any of you know of any system built along these lines? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The NEW KODAK i700 Series Scanners deliver under ANY circumstances! Your production scanning environment may not be a perfect world - but thanks to Kodak, there's a perfect scanner to get the job done! With the NEW KODAK i700 Series Scanner you'll get full speed at 300 dpi even with all image processing features enabled. http://p.sf.net/sfu/kodak-com _______________________________________________ Factor-talk mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/factor-talk
