reply to list my earlier message as I sent this to Guenter only due to
his reply-to address
On 02/29/2012 09:04 PM, Andre Blum wrote:
Jones, I respect You, but here You are on the wrong track.
This device is not intended to have any real-world-interfacing.
It is located in a virtual world with only indirect interfacing to
the r-w via USB.
Look at olimexino and its relatives, how this is done. This is just
80MHz compared to the fancy 800MHz, but the difference is, that You
talk to the 'world' (TM) with 80MHz, compared to 'Yourself ' (no TM)
with 800MHz.
So what is the difference, exactly?
The device *does* have real world interfacing. In fact it has plenty.
It has 2 i2c ports, SPI, UART, (not sure, but I believe also analog
in), many GPIO's. It does however only have "only" 26 pins that you
have to find a right muxing for to map them to your function. An
arduino duemilanove has about the same # pins. A beaglebone has more
like 80 of them.
Arduino-like devices are very nice, too, and cheap. And you are right
that you could use it just as well for controlling this kind of
setups. Then, to control the arduino, you would need a computer for
the necessary 'human interfacing'.
With the idea in mind that people might actually want to have more
than one peerpressure setup (for example for Defkalion-like
inert/loaded comparisons), it is wise to have stand-alone controllers
that can be managed over a web interface and also optionally can
contact the internet database servers with their results on their own.
Also, it is a matter of taste, but in my eyes a big pro that you can
program these ARM devices like you can program your PC: use python,
java, proper operating system calls, multitasking, memory allocation,
nice storage support, etc.
