Roman Gezikov had written, on 12/01/2010 01:47 PM, the following:
Thank you for your reply!
Well, actually we develop SW for the chip that we manufacture and sell,
so we need direct i2c connection to the application processor to truly
mimic customer's platform.
panda- and beagleboard are both ARM based. What's about atom based ones?
Looking at your requirements:
1 Device is over I2C bus and over UART
2 build MeeGo itself
3 compile our own SW (pure C language)
4 without any big troubles meaning:
4.1 tool chain,
4.2 documentation for the board
4.3 system bring up process should be good
5 Able to buy the platform
Lets take these one by one:
1 Device is over I2C bus and over UART
if you are using Linux (and MeeGo is Standard Linux to the roots! ):
A) your app is pure userspace, you'd use
i2c: i2c chardev
uart: tty
B) your device support in kernel, you'd use:
i2c: i2c slave
uart: tty
in either case, your app'd not care anything at all on which platform it
runs on, because Linux abstracts the actual hardware controller into
standard interfaces for device drivers to use regardless of the
underlying platform at all.
2. Build MeeGo itself
cool - beagleboard and pandaboard have meego builds - so do other atom
based ones.
3 compile our own SW (pure C language)
excellent - as you probably already know - Linux is not really "C" - but
"Gcc C" ;) - as long as you dont use custom #pragma of some weirdo
compiler and are C99 or ANSI C compliant or just plain compilable with
gcc - you should be good
*But* be aware that gcc in MeeGo is gcc 4.5 - there are some quirks
around it as well.. oh and by the way - you can build with gcc on beagle
or panda itself just like you can do on atom or a PC ;)
one major delta between beagle and Panda however is SMP - Panda is OMAP4
with dual cores and beagle is OMAP3 with a single core - if you'd like
your app to run on "really every possible platforms" - choose SMP - SMP
programming is more "fun" and picks up quiet a bit of interesting bugs
in s/w - and most serious developers I know at least, choose some SMP
platform as well for getting the bugs out of their code ;)
Bottom line - you are perfectly placed in MeeGo to use C and any type of
hardware.
4 without any big troubles meaning:
4.1 tool chain,
No problems there - just use gcc 4.5 ;) native builds are possible as
well.. just do zypper install gcc :D
4.2 documentation for the board
beagleboard (beagleboard.org) and pandaboard(pandaboard.org) both
provide extensive details - schematics, board files, chip TRMs etc.. +
there are mailing lists and irc channels to talk to other folks on
similar platforms (at the time of this email, #pandaboard has 127
members and #beagle 190 members on freenode.net)
I am not very knowledgeable about Atom ones unfortunately. mebbe others
in the list can help here..
4.3 system bring up process should be good
beagle and panda both have documented bring up procedure -
wiki.meego.com has details :)
5 Able to buy the platform
easy - beagleboard.org - beagle regular is now 125$ and beagleboard Xm
is 150$, pandaboard is 174$ (at least last I checked ;) ).. and you can
get it from distributors - but be warned - waiting lines exist even now.
beagle however has an edge of being around for quiet some time now
probably with a wider distributor base
Again, my ignorance of Atom platform does'nt help me give you anything
useful here :(. folks on list, please help..
Given your requirements, as far as I personally see it - it just does'nt
matter which platform you develop on.. just choose the one you are
personally comfortable with and start hacking some code ;)
---
Regards,
Nishanth Menon
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