Thanks guys for the thorough explanations. I never thought about some
the issues you guys mention.
On 14/08/2012 22:41, Michele Bavaro wrote:
Hello Danny,
I agree completely with you: the trend is very clear.
Tshepang,
By saying that there is no commercial product development path beyond PI
I meant that there is very little to reuse of the PI once you have
RTKLIB running on it. It is surely a good learning exercise - as it was
with Beagleboard at the time Mr. Takasu did it ...but it is not that
useful afterwards. As Danny pointed out -would you want to make a real
"market piece"- you would immediately need to move away from the
Broadcom SoC and use another chip, perhaps another toolchain (Cortex-Ax
are now everywhere), another BSP, and perhaps even operating system (I
would love to see RTKLIB on Android).
New embedded platforms are coming out every day. Personally I love
Olinuxino, Gumstix, Beaglebone, Colibri, FriendlyARM, AcmeSystems, etc..
and I see three potential reasons to port RTKLIB on an embedded platform:
- having fun whilst learning
Who could ever desire otherwise?? Can't really argue about this :)
- innovating
But.. running RTKLIB on PI is "easy"..I must say thanks to the really
good quality of the code itself.
IMHO it wouldn't be a major breakthrough compared to Beagleboard (3
years later).
We run it now on an ARM9 and it took us 3 days of work to go from a
blank SD card and development environment to having rtkrcv/rnx2rtkp running.
When Danny said he was targeting a STM32F4 (168MHz, 128kBytes RAM)
...well that would have been showing off!
- making a cheap, inexpensive product for new unexplored markets
Then again, I think there are better choices than PI to shorten the time
from the lab to the shelves
Beyond the critical thinking above let me make clear that I fully
respect RaspberryPI: it's a great SBC!
All the best,
Michele
On 14/08/2012 21:28, Danny Miller wrote:
Raspberry Pi was developed by a nonprofit entity. They don't make
money on them. This already seemed to be a problem IMHO when the
release date got pushed and production went very slowly as they
released units basically one-by-one. You don't usually see this sort
of thing in capitalist enterprises. Apple might not have enough iPads
for "everyone" on their release date, but that's because they've
convinced 10% of the US population that they must have one on Day 1 of
the release and they've bought up all the free mfg in China to make them.
While they made a lot of them, they're not guaranteed to make them
forever or update the tech (it's a maintenance issue). The Raspberry
Pi Foundation is not only nonprofit, it's literally only 6 people.
When one or two moves on or gets hit by a bus, it's plausible the
project will die.
It's also a problem that the Broadcom chip at the core of the Pi is
NOT for sale elsewhere. It was a special, personal agreement between
Broadcom execs and RPF members. There will be no competitors using the
Broadcom chip unless things change substantially.
However, this isn't actually a problem. The RPI is merely the vanguard
of a new tech of cheap, powerful, single-board Linux computers. The
"Broadcom" chip is actually an industry-standard ARM6K core, sold as
design IP to many OEMs. Broadcom added the video core and memory
around the ARM instruction core and fabbed it. Any mfg with the ARM6K
(or another ARM core up to the task) could do it even without the
video core, but might be interfacing through a low-resolution LCD
protocol hacked together, or through a terminal port (issuing and
accepting ASCII command lines through a data port such as UART, USB,
ethernet, etc).
But that's beside the point, because the Raspberry Pi will soon be
matched by an equal or superior core running Linux. There already ARE
ones specified. BeagleBoard was an early one- and expensive, for what
it did, relatively speaking- but Moore's Law expansion applies to
Single Board Computers. Next year they've got the open-source OUYA
gaming console planned for release at $99, which is a helluva LOT more
power than the RPI.
IMHO we can expect to see commercially profitable Linux SPCs of
comparable core power to the RPI, with supporting Linux distros, at
Mouser, Digikey, etc within a couple of years. Note the console RTKLIB
sources are not machine-specific. If the ports are hooked up, there's
an FPU or enough core to implement FP calcs with regular instructions,
and enough RAM, it should run. Well you need a compiler for that core-
but right now all this stuff is one of the ARM cores and we have GCC
compilers for the ARM cores, and can expect a GCC for any core to come
out in the future.
Danny
On 8/14/2012 12:56 PM, Tshepang Lekhonkhobe wrote:
On 14/08/2012 11:31, Michele Bavaro wrote:
Raspberry-PI is useless for me as there is no commercial product
development path beyond it.
Can you explain what this, 'commercial development path', means?
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