[FOSS-GPS] RTKLib MIPS requirements?

Wed Aug 15 01:39:50 PDT 2012

Thanks guys for the thorough explanations. I never thought about some 
the issues you guys mention.

On 14/08/2012 22:41, Michele Bavaro wrote:
> Hello Danny,
>
> I agree completely with you: the trend is very clear.
>
> Tshepang,
> 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).
>
> 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:
>
> - having fun whilst learning
> Who could ever desire otherwise?? Can't really argue about this :)
>
> - innovating
> But.. running RTKLIB on PI is "easy"..I must say thanks to the really
> good quality of the code itself.
> IMHO it wouldn't be a major breakthrough compared to Beagleboard (3
> years later).
> 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.
> When Danny said he was targeting a STM32F4 (168MHz, 128kBytes RAM)
> ...well that would have been showing off!
>
> - making a cheap, inexpensive product for new unexplored markets
> Then again, I think there are better choices than PI to shorten the time
> from the lab to the shelves
>
> Beyond the critical thinking above let me make clear that I fully
> respect RaspberryPI: it's a great SBC!
>
> All the best,
> Michele
>
>
> On 14/08/2012 21:28, Danny Miller wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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).
>>
>> 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 planned for release at $99, which is a helluva LOT more
>> power than the RPI.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> Danny
>>
>> On 8/14/2012 12:56 PM, Tshepang Lekhonkhobe wrote:
>>> On 14/08/2012 11:31, Michele Bavaro wrote:
>>>> Raspberry-PI is useless for me as there is no commercial product
>>>> development path beyond it.
>>>
>>> Can you explain what this, 'commercial development path', means?
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