An industrial product - very interesting !
I just got an iiMac (or is that i^2Mac ? ... Intel iMac ;-) at home.
If I can get my wife off it for an hour (she loves it), and ge tthe
Developer Tools installed, I can try out building and running the Mac
OS X client (though I'll probably go with the version I put
additional fixes into, which was post 2.1.0).
I should obviously rebuild the native code as a universal binary
(that omission was a bit shortsighted of me considering I worked on
this stuff three years ago, but at the time it was kind of secret ;-}).
At some point I will look at the 3.0 version - perhaps this weekend
if I can find a bit of spare time. I remember Markus said the USB
code needed some rework for his new scheme. I'll look back through my
e-mail to see if I can find what he told me.
Andy
Begin forwarded message:
From: Joseph Goldstone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 9 February 2006 23:08:07 GMT-08:00
To: leJOS discussion list <[email protected]>
Subject: [Lejos-discussion] leJOS 2.1.0 on Intel-based Mac OS X?
Hello--
I have a shipped industrial product that uses leJOS 2.1.0. It's a
embedded system controller
for a system that measures the spectral transmission of large
numbers of 35mm print film
patches - a 5,000 frame roll takes about 12 hours to measure. The
system was developed
using Mac OS X and a USB tower on a somewhat old G4 PowerBook host,
then deployed
using IRIX and a serial tower on an unbelievably antique SGI O2 host.
I want to replace that SGI O2 with a MacBook Pro laptop. That
introduces two (or three)
new factors:
(1) it's Mac OS X on a machine with little-endian byte order
(2) it's a dual-processor machine
(3) the USB substrate may be different; on the other hand I've
verified on my G4
that the Keyspan serial adapter hardware and driver work just fine
for using the serial
tower, and Keyspan has a Mac Intel driver, so (3) isn't a deal-
breaking issue.
My questions are:
- how much of leJOS 2.1.0 assumes that if it's running on Mac OS X,
e.g. #ifdef __APPLE__, it's big-endian?
- are there multi-threaded parts of leJOS 2.1.0 that might expose
race conditions on
a dual-proc machine? Have people out there used leJOS on dual-
proc hardware?
I would really rather not make the leap to leJOS 3.whatever unless
I need to do so. The
leJOS 2.1.0-based system works great, but the O2 is showing its age
and I don't know
that one can readily get parts. If I'm replacing it, I'd like to
be forward-looking and go
with an Intel Mac.
There is the set of tests in the regression dir, but that depends
on the emulator working,
which is not the case in lejos 2.1.0 on Mac OS X. So I'm looking
for an opinion from the
leJOS maintainers and user base here on endian dependencies.
I do have the opportunity to test this without having to buy a
machine first -- Apple
has a hardware compatibility lab for registered developers in
Cupertino, and I am only
about 45 minutes away from there. So if people have particular
areas of concern and
associated tests to run I could try them out (and if someone wants
a test compile of
leJOS 3.whatever, or a metering run on the new hardware, I'd be
only too happy to
do that as a form of repayment.)
Anyone? Comments?
--joseph
ps: in the worst case I just buy a final-G4-model PowerBook, but
jeez, it hurts so much
to give up on the 2X-4X speed bump...
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so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you
can meet girls.
—M. Cartmill
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