I feel like a kid at Christmas all over again
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I'm on a hiatus from coding, saving myself for my ARM equipment that's coming. I am taking the "smart" from smartphones and putting it in my devices. Not just stuffing Rpis in stuff either. More bespoke. This is a whole new realm for me. A real GPU? Are you kidding? DDR3 RAM? HDMI? I can run a "real" OS if I want? I don't need all this. I wouldn't mind something more in between what I have been using and this, but the chip is $12 and that's not even bulk reel prices. I've paid far more for a simple USB Host chip, and this chip does that *too* These ARM Cortex A based SoCs are fabulous. I've never been a fan of the RPi, in part because it was a bit too heavy for me. I don't need gigs of RAM. I don't want a $100 unit. $30 is more about the price point for a prototype board built with components of the cost we want to hit an 80% use case - in other words, a board that cheap won't make our clients balk when we go to buy the components to replicate it, almost no matter what we're building. I also found secret sauce for going from HDMI to 40-pin RGB which was a huge win for me. Now we can use any LCD under the sun. I need to brush up on STL (it has been awhile since I've used it heavily), heck maybe even learn QT. I'm so happy to have gotten this far with it. I'll be spending some more time tinkering and coming up with a workflow and firmware package for this before I've got my feet under me, but now this feels major league. Like I've broken through. I like the ESP platform family but they are simplistic, and the biggest thing is they can't drive most LCDs you can buy of any reasonable capability. I like coding in constrained memory. It keeps me creative. That said, this Arm stuff is my brave new world, or without the negative literary connotations I guess, my final frontier. This was so challenging for me to get to this point. I have a lot further to go, and then you can darn well bet I'll be producing code project articles to get everyone on board, without the Raspberry Pi training wheels.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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I'm on a hiatus from coding, saving myself for my ARM equipment that's coming. I am taking the "smart" from smartphones and putting it in my devices. Not just stuffing Rpis in stuff either. More bespoke. This is a whole new realm for me. A real GPU? Are you kidding? DDR3 RAM? HDMI? I can run a "real" OS if I want? I don't need all this. I wouldn't mind something more in between what I have been using and this, but the chip is $12 and that's not even bulk reel prices. I've paid far more for a simple USB Host chip, and this chip does that *too* These ARM Cortex A based SoCs are fabulous. I've never been a fan of the RPi, in part because it was a bit too heavy for me. I don't need gigs of RAM. I don't want a $100 unit. $30 is more about the price point for a prototype board built with components of the cost we want to hit an 80% use case - in other words, a board that cheap won't make our clients balk when we go to buy the components to replicate it, almost no matter what we're building. I also found secret sauce for going from HDMI to 40-pin RGB which was a huge win for me. Now we can use any LCD under the sun. I need to brush up on STL (it has been awhile since I've used it heavily), heck maybe even learn QT. I'm so happy to have gotten this far with it. I'll be spending some more time tinkering and coming up with a workflow and firmware package for this before I've got my feet under me, but now this feels major league. Like I've broken through. I like the ESP platform family but they are simplistic, and the biggest thing is they can't drive most LCDs you can buy of any reasonable capability. I like coding in constrained memory. It keeps me creative. That said, this Arm stuff is my brave new world, or without the negative literary connotations I guess, my final frontier. This was so challenging for me to get to this point. I have a lot further to go, and then you can darn well bet I'll be producing code project articles to get everyone on board, without the Raspberry Pi training wheels.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
