On Sat, 16 May 2015 20:07:21 -0700 (PDT), the renowned rangerssuck
wrote:

On Saturday, May 16, 2015 at 5:35:43 PM UTC-4, Michael Terrell wrote:
Karl Townsend wrote:

...
Arduino works with their langauge but you can also us "C" language, so get
the documentation for GNU C for more capabilities.

I wrote a program that uses timers modeled after Allen Bradley PLC timers.

I also have BeagleBone Black and Raspberry PI, they have processing power
and lots of memory but I don't feel like I control all the code like I do in
an Arduino. Also I can't replace the processor as easily if I make a
mistake in the wiring.

RogerN


Roger, I played with PicBasic controllers for a while...

Seemed like a simple entry level control unit. How does these compare
to arduino?



Karl, there are quite a few levels of Arduino boards. Look at their
website to get a better understanding.

http://arduino.cc/

And then when you've got your design working, you can build it with just the AVR chip and leave out the other Arduino stuff, if you want to. I've built MANY things that started as Arduino boards for the easy prototyping and ended up as dedicated PC boards.

Welcome aboard, Tom. There may be hope for you yet. And all kidding aside, if you can blink and LED, you can do pretty much anything (assuming you also can read an input). If you can blink an LED in response to an input, you really can do anything.

And Holy crap, I'm on the same page as RogerN on this as well. Working with smaller controllers lets you get MUCH closer to the hardware. there is no operating system in the way. (zowie, could the end-times REALLY be near? ;-)

I don't know if it exists yet, but my interest in Beagle Bone and it's ilk will be higher when there is a real-time deterministic operating system available. No question that some of my designs need more horsepower. Often, I just divide up the tasks and add another AVR. For instance, I'm currently working on a line-scan camera that has four AVRs (all mega 328s). The tasks divide up nicely and I have the tools and the parts, and don't have to learn (or buy) anything new to get the job done. and nobody's going to cry about the $12 worth of extra parts.

The BBBlack TI processor includes two 200MHz 32-bit RISC co-processors
that can be used for real-time tasks.

I'm not sure that there is a huge advantage to running an open-source
RTOS (especially one that is not widely used) on the main processor
when most of what it is doing is running communication stacks.


--
Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany
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