Embedded systems

hairy_hats

Gumstix[^] and Toradex[^] may offer what you want.

Lost User

ARM would probably be best if a PIC isn't up to the job. [added]The Gumstix use ARM cores from TI.

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DaveyM69

<voicetype = "Mr Burns">Excellent</voicetype> - thanks :beer:

Dave
BTW, in software, hope and pray is not a viable strategy. (Luc Pattyn)
Visual Basic is not used by normal people so we're not covering it here. (Uncyclopedia)
Why are you using VB6? Do you hate yourself? (Christian Graus)

OriginalGriff

Just be carefull with ARM cored processors as they can become unavailable or superseeded quickly. Remember that most are created for a specific make and model of product, and sold to the outside world to help re-coup design costs. When the product run ends, do does availablity of the processor - Samsung are (in my experience) very bad at this. Very nice core to work with though (32bit RISC? RISC? Who are they kidding?)

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benjymous

The Arduino[^] is a nifty bit of hardware, too (and open source, so you can build your own hardware from their reference designs, if you want)

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benjymous

The BeagleBoard[^] is pretty good if you want a pretty much complete ARM system to hack around with

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DaveyM69

That looks cool too - thanks.

Dave
BTW, in software, hope and pray is not a viable strategy. (Luc Pattyn)
Visual Basic is not used by normal people so we're not covering it here. (Uncyclopedia)
Why are you using VB6? Do you hate yourself? (Christian Graus)

Single Step Debugger

Back in the days I used to work with Motorola 14K series and “SingleStep“ C/C++ compiler/debugger/I need to refresh my memory, but this was the debugger name/. With a few words: Decent C++ compiler/no templates of course/, good amount of I/O libraries, the debugger works okay and has the best “memory viewer” I’ve ever seen even in the Windows word.

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Christopher Duncan

Back in 1989 I worked on a system that ran on the QNX[^] operating system. It's a UNIX like OS that eventually targeted the embedded system market since competing with Microsoft in the OS business was at the time pretty much a non-starter. I remember having great fun with it before getting sucked into the DOS / Windows world of Microsoft the following year.

Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalUSA.com

dwjost

All the other recommendations look pretty good, and I think I may even place some orders myself.. I'm not sure of your requirements, and since embedded systems is part of my job description, you could try: http://www.xilinx.com/products/devkits/DO-SD1800A-EDK-DK-UNI-G.htm[^] I've had experience with an older version of this product, and with other higher end products (which a colleague and I implemented an SoC prototype GPS/GLONASS receiver on). This particular board also comes with scaled down versions of the development tools (as far as I can tell, from the web page, since I use the full versions for work). The embedded development kit should come with SoC designs for the FPGA specific to that board, so you should be able to get it going out of the box. The firmware tool chain is GNU (>=4.1), and the IDE is Eclipse, with plug-ins specifically for embedded development with Xilinx FPGAs. If you want to take the plunge and learn some hardware design using VHDL (Ada-like Hardware Description Language) or Verilog (vaguely resembles C, only on the surface), you can also design custom integrated hardware for the FPGA. There are other higher end boards, depending upon the amount of money you want to spend (invest?). Just so it doesn't appear that I'm trying to sell Xilinx (I just happen to use there products for most of my work), an alternative (which I haven't had any experience with, because I get the best field support for Xilinx), is Altera: http://www.altera.com/[^]. They are a direct competitor to Xilinx, and probably provide similar, if not better boards. I'd say, if you are interested in embedded development, even at the hobby level, SoC (or even custom logic) can get fairly addictive.

Douglas Jost

Mark_Wallace

I can't make phone calls with my mouse.

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Stuart Dootson

This[^] looks to have plenty of useful links. This book[^] details (and includes) the implementation of a pre-emptive RTOS - I've found it to be pretty useful.

DaveyM69 wrote:

My next hobby project maybe! I've been doing hardware and software stuff with PICs and assembly for what seems like a lifetime now and the project idea I have is going to be way too much for a PIC to handle. So I figured I should develop a embedded system - but I have no idea where to start here, particularly on the hardware side.

Sounds like time to have at least some architectural principles in your code then :-) Seriously, without going overboard, layer your code nicely and modularise properly and life is a lot easier, especially if you want to move code between platforms.

Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p