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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Hello Danny,<br>
<br>
I agree completely with you: the trend is very clear.<br>
<br>
Tshepang,<br>
By saying that there is no commercial product development path
beyond PI I meant that there is very little to reuse of the PI
once you have RTKLIB running on it. It is surely a good learning
exercise - as it was with Beagleboard at the time Mr. Takasu did
it ...but it is not that useful afterwards. As Danny pointed out
-would you want to make a real "market piece"- you would
immediately need to move away from the Broadcom SoC and use
another chip, perhaps another toolchain (Cortex-Ax are now
everywhere), another BSP, and perhaps even operating system (I
would love to see RTKLIB on Android).<br>
<br>
New embedded platforms are coming out every day. Personally I love
Olinuxino, Gumstix, Beaglebone, Colibri, FriendlyARM, AcmeSystems,
etc.. and I see three potential reasons to port RTKLIB on an
embedded platform:<br>
<br>
- having fun whilst learning<br>
Who could ever desire otherwise?? Can't really argue about this :)<br>
<br>
- innovating<br>
But.. running RTKLIB on PI is "easy"..I must say thanks to the
really good quality of the code itself. <br>
IMHO it wouldn't be a major breakthrough compared to Beagleboard
(3 years later).<br>
We run it now on an ARM9 and it took us 3 days of work to go from
a blank SD card and development environment to having
rtkrcv/rnx2rtkp running.<br>
When Danny said he was targeting a STM32F4 (168MHz, 128kBytes RAM)
...well that would have been showing off!<br>
<br>
- making a cheap, inexpensive product for new unexplored markets<br>
Then again, I think there are better choices than PI to shorten
the time from the lab to the shelves<br>
<br>
Beyond the critical thinking above let me make clear that I fully
respect RaspberryPI: it's a great SBC!<br>
<br>
All the best,<br>
Michele<br>
<br>
<br>
On 14/08/2012 21:28, Danny Miller wrote:<br>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Raspberry Pi was developed by a
nonprofit entity. They don't make money on them. This already
seemed to be a problem IMHO when the release date got pushed and
production went very slowly as they released units basically
one-by-one. You don't usually see this sort of thing in
capitalist enterprises. Apple might not have enough iPads for
"everyone" on their release date, but that's because they've
convinced 10% of the US population that they must have one on
Day 1 of the release and they've bought up all the free mfg in
China to make them. <br>
<br>
While they made a lot of them, they're not guaranteed to make
them forever or update the tech (it's a maintenance issue). The
Raspberry Pi Foundation is not only nonprofit, it's literally
only 6 people. When one or two moves on or gets hit by a bus,
it's plausible the project will die.<br>
<br>
It's also a problem that the Broadcom chip at the core of the Pi
is NOT for sale elsewhere. It was a special, personal agreement
between Broadcom execs and RPF members. There will be no
competitors using the Broadcom chip unless things change
substantially.<br>
<br>
However, this isn't actually a problem. The RPI is merely the
vanguard of a new tech of cheap, powerful, single-board Linux
computers. The "Broadcom" chip is actually an
industry-standard ARM6K core, sold as design IP to many OEMs.
Broadcom added the video core and memory around the ARM
instruction core and fabbed it. Any mfg with the ARM6K (or
another ARM core up to the task) could do it even without the
video core, but might be interfacing through a low-resolution
LCD protocol hacked together, or through a terminal port
(issuing and accepting ASCII command lines through a data port
such as UART, USB, ethernet, etc).<br>
<br>
But that's beside the point, because the Raspberry Pi will soon
be matched by an equal or superior core running Linux. There
already ARE ones specified. BeagleBoard was an early one- and
expensive, for what it did, relatively speaking- but Moore's Law
expansion applies to Single Board Computers. Next year they've
got the open-source OUYA gaming console <span style="color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;
font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal;
font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height:
24px; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px;
text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2;
word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;
-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; display: inline !important;
float: none; "></span>planned for release at $99, which is a
helluva LOT more power than the RPI. <br>
<br>
IMHO we can expect to see commercially profitable Linux SPCs of
comparable core power to the RPI, with supporting Linux distros,
at Mouser, Digikey, etc within a couple of years. Note the
console RTKLIB sources are not machine-specific. If the ports
are hooked up, there's an FPU or enough core to implement FP
calcs with regular instructions, and enough RAM, it should run.
Well you need a compiler for that core- but right now all this
stuff is one of the ARM cores and we have GCC compilers for the
ARM cores, and can expect a GCC for any core to come out in the
future.<br>
<br>
Danny<br>
<br>
On 8/14/2012 12:56 PM, Tshepang Lekhonkhobe wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote cite="mid:502A9137.1050302@gmail.com" type="cite">On
14/08/2012 11:31, Michele Bavaro wrote: <br>
<blockquote type="cite">Raspberry-PI is useless for me as there
is no commercial product <br>
development path beyond it. <br>
</blockquote>
<br>
Can you explain what this, 'commercial development path', means?
<br>
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