An ARM Cortex A with on-chip PRU is made only by Texas Instruments and I don't see this gaining market share or being used in very many new designs. It is becoming a speciality item. That said, I think TI will support their customers and continue making the old chips for sometime. But I doubt we will see PRUs in the newest and best ARM A chips. So if you want to continue using PRUs you will have to be content to use these TI chips
Like me, I think many engineers are reluctant to specify a single source part. When the single source decides it is no longer profitable to sell the part you are stuck. I think the world is moving (or has moved) to using Cortex-M for this purpose. The "A" and "M" type ARMs have won the battle and are nearly ubiquitous in new designs All that said, if this is a hobby project and you only need one or two for your own use, use what ever you like If you ask me about future trends in motion control, what I am seeing is a trend to move the closed control loops physically closer to the actual motors. Trends move glacially slow in the machine tool world it will catch up eventually. for example the bests stepper motors now look something like this example: www.leadshine.com/....ntegrated-easy-servo-motors <http://www.leadshine.com/producttypes.aspx?type=products&category=easy-servo-products&producttype=integrated-easy-servo-motors> By moving the loop al the way out to the motor they dramatically improve performance and reduce heat and greatly improve torque. And don't add much cost. The stepper acts like a servo. Here is another product line where the same idea is applied to serves teknic.com/products/clearpath-brushless-dc-servo-motors/ <https://www.teknic.com/products/clearpath-brushless-dc-servo-motors/?kw=servo%20controls&ad=156385283207&gclid=CjwKCAjwmqHPBRBQEiwAOvbR81mtRSzU3QcKx6HZO1EjGqsf-uK70HeMyhD1PYOSwS2HlKpr_46MTxoCcPoQAvD_BwE> Basically the trend is, from a big picture point of view is keep the encoder sensor data near the motor and never bring it back to the main controller. If I'm designing today I want to either emulate this or accommodate it. Places the PRU inside the ARM chip forces the centralized design On Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 10:38 PM, Bas de Bruijn <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On 17 Oct 2017, at 23:57, Chris Albertson <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > > My opinion of PRUs is that I just don't want to invest in writing PRU > code because that chip is likely is disappear soon. When the platform > vanishes the code will need complete re-write. > > Hi Chris, how come you think that the chip:platform wil vanish soon? > -- Chris Albertson Redondo Beach, California -- website: http://www.machinekit.io blog: http://blog.machinekit.io github: https://github.com/machinekit --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Machinekit" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/machinekit. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
