On 11/09/2010 08:39 PM, Eric House wrote: > A friend and I had a crazy idea for a linux-based appliance that only > works if it can be an order of magnitude cheaper than the Soekris and > PCEngines boxes I'm used to tinkering with. And so I went googling to > figure out just how low in the system-on-chip world I could go and > still run something close to vanilla linux. And found nothing. > > It must be that I don't know what search terms to use. Does anybody > here? That is, how do I figure out what the cheapest SOC is for which > I can build my own kernel and userspace stack? Or does one even do > that in the embedded world? Does one instead run something the SOC > vendor provides? I think of myself as knowing "embedded linux" > because I work on a linux-based smartphone OS, but smartphone hardware > is a lot more capable than what I'm trying to research here. Any > pointers to get me started?
Generally the goal of selecting embedded hardware is to obtain the cheapest platform that offers reasonable performance in whatever domain you're working on. You seem to be approaching the problem in the reverse order. What do you need the device to do? How small does it need to be? Are we talking about a handheld, battery-powered device or something that can run on AC power? Does it need to run video, display a user interface, or act as a headless web server, etc? FWIW TI is releasing an extremely inexpensive board called the Panda Board. I think it's targeted around $100 or so (likely in volume), and uses modern ARM (v7) hardware. The tiniest, most inexpensive Linux-based devices I know of are "smart" ethernet ports, which often only offer a tiny embedded webserver an miniscule amounts of flash memory. Useful when tied to a sensors in data acquisition situations. Scott -- Scott Garman sgarman at zenlinux dot com _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
