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Low Cost SBC Dev Kits for Embedded App Training?
SmilingMonk writes "The company I work for is looking to train engineers fresh out of school on embedded software development. It seems to be specialized enough field of interest that it might be helpful for some people to 'get their feet wet' developing embedded solutions on in-expensive SBC ? s before they are handed off to the product lines. A low cost ($400) full featured solution we recently stumbled across is the eCOG1 Development Environment. Yes, we've been to LinuxDevices, but feel compelled to ask which similarly featured low priced SBCs others have used that we could have our trainees develop embedded Linux applications on?"
[shameless plug]
I'm an embedded development and training consultant. I have a tutorial on my website that features the ARM Evaluator 7T board (about $250) and a complete procedure for building the arm-elf GNU toolchain and debugging a simple "hello, world!" program.
I have both onsite and public training courses available, and I'm working on an elearning site as we speak. I'm also available for just plain old embedded development tasks. See my resume.
The ARM7TDMI chip that the Evaluator 7T uses doesn't have as many peripherals as the eCog chip you mention, but it is a true 32-bit chip with a GNU-supported instruction set and debugging environment. Hard to beat that!
[/shameless plug]
HTH,
b.g.
I don't think LinuxDevices can be beat for anything relating to embedded Linux development. Great to learn on too!
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Have you thought about using a regular desktop PC?
You could teach people how to set up a minimal Linux system using their own kernel, busybox etc. As far as embedded hardware goes, I'm sure the parallel port can be one good way of introducing device drivers on several levels. It is fairly simple to understand and program.
Freevo - Linux Multimedia Jukebox
Dude....its a freaking news site. It doesn't even usually come up with its own articles. It gathers them from the net, and people discuss it. The "Gays" that run it put moderation in the hands of the people that use the site. Their power here is little. You however seem to only want to discuss gay sex and anuses being pryed open and how the management of this site enjoys that in thier spare time. I frankly don't give a shit...I say some ascii art, decided to look, and say an exposed anus. You talk abou how "meritocracy" isn't a word, concept or a dream and yet you post unfounded slander and links to exposed assholes. I think "common decency" is simply unheard of to you.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
You see, the best thing to do, in the face of totalitarian fascist leadership is to whittle at them, whenever you can, however you can. I fight for freedom from oppression here! I was once a faithful type, going for insightful, informative or otherwise. But a funny thing happens here. If things are well formatted and seem informative, insightful or interesting, but they really aren't, the slashfool crowd mods it up. I have seen so much crap here disguised as real posts for karma whoreing or to show the total weakness in this system. Legitimately criticize the editors or how SlashGarbage is setup, and you get modded down, told to go somewhere else, what have you. I have to see lameness, junk characters , compression filters, and WPL restrictions on legitimate posts. So, as a former legitimate poster, I said, fuck this crap. I'm a good guy being treated like crap. So I turned to the side of the freedom fighters. I will try and widen, abuse, crapflood, and being really foul and obnoxious. This tends to draw mod fire from okay posts that get modded down because of an alternate viewpoint, typical here. This also shows what every fascist fails to learn, the more you try and suppress, the harder people try. These people are arrogant, pompous, and frankly undeserving of the position at the head of the Slashdot user base. We are powerless to the effects and whims of Rob Malda and his fat, disgusting undereducated overzealous bastard friends. His horrible persistence to subjecting the readers to that piece of crap Katz. There are many reasons why this place has gone to shit. One of the main ones is that Malda is probably not hungry (as in, doesn't have to anonymously blow men in stalls in Subways like he used to make rent and afford dinner). He is complacent. The more complacent fascists get, they worse the treat their subjects. So I commit acts of distaste. I point out bullshit comments when I see them. I point out that often the editors bias and attitudes are only those held by pompous assholes in a sheltered work environment in a sheltered life. These disgusting fucks don't have to put up with the crap you do. No, they sold off their dignity with god damn pop up advertising and mass marketing techniques. They sold out, to a not so impressive bidder. And now they are legitimized, the continue to terrorize and vastly innocent and impressionable mean 13 year old "community" with complete lies, crap, wrong opinions and fill them with aspirations to be as they are, and in reality, who these people are fat, undisciplined, unintelligent, incapable of writing HTML code generation that doesn't drastically violate W3C or put random spaces in URLS. These people would never be able to work for a company, they are essentially worthless and incapable of effectively being responsible for the readership. Editors would do real work. Crediting sources. Correcting mistakes. And leaving would be fools, troll, and crap flooders to face -1, not try and limit the crap that they post. Everything about this fuck hole needs revision, revision in code, in leadership, in concept. I can only hope that one of these sexless fuck moderators gets prostate cancer so that one might get a chance to fill the small intellectual void the fat headed moderator just left. These are vile, foul, disgusting, asshole-minded pieces of detritus need to be relegated to the garbage dump from which they were spawned. I really hate these fucking donkey puke assfuckers.
Who cares if you get modded down? It's not like you're freedom goes away--quit whining. It's not the end of the world--until your Karma gets below neutral of course (your posts then get ignored because they start at "0"). I always see posts that criticize (without slandering) articles/staff that get 5's. And well-formatted posts make them easier to read. IF you see someone with a "5" and well-formatted garbage, reply and show them how thier argument is bad. If you're ideas are good, well presented, and reflect thought, you're guaranteed at least a "3". Believe it or not, there is a correlation between the time taken to write a post and the thought put into it and therefore the merit of the post. The moderation system is not for people to exert power, supress critizism, or control people (you seem to liken /. to an opressive government). It's to make it easy for users to weed out the unformatted garbage/trolls from the more intelligible and thoughtful posts.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Cybertec http://www.cybertec.com.au have a product that is based on open-source software that looks like it would fit your requirements.
Processor = Coldfire 5272
Compiler Tools = gnu (linux or windoze hosted)
RTOS = RTEMS (The best RTOS in the world! http://www.rtems.com)
The cost listed on the web site is $ 525 AUD
(i.e. about $260 US).
I have not used the product but I the company is very active is supporting Coldfire and RTEMS.
Best regards
Paul
BTW "oppressive" was not spelt incorrectly :)
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
We are giving a seminar to a number of engineering students with the same goal and have put a lot of material online.
:)
More information should become online on DSPInfoExchange, but as with most companies, promises, promises, promises... If you are interested, you can always contact me for the rest.
If you have a look at the Texas Instruments website and look for DSP Fest or Developer's Conference, you'll find a lot of relevant material. They promised to release linux tools a couple of weeks ago on the tidevcon 2002 (not the full blown gfx interface, but rather gdb like) for the 'C6000 line. Let's hope they deliver
Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
I began thinking you were some troll, and you turned out having a well thought out argument. I'm still not swayed by the whole geek-control thing, but I do agree there are a lot of trolls. I've been doing alot of experimentation of posting and what sort of messages get modded up and in "funny" posts I make fun of blind anti-M$ sentiment and I get modded down and flamed for exactly what I'm mocking...oh well
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Chose the software first (dev and debug tools), then the target. I'm not sure that setting up a cross-dev chain is a must, but learning to *use* some is mandatory. In the gcc chain, at least the binbutils part, there are tools like objcopy or objdump that you may not heard of if you stay with PC/PC. Embedding is cross-compiling. It's not just the same: different object format, static vs dynamic link, endianeness, different library... and then there's the upload to target and debug step. cross/remote-debugging is special: is slows down your code-compile-debug cycle, you may not have the full debuger capability your used to, you may have to write some debuger script to put your target in a known step first. Will you debug via serial with a ROM-monitor of a kind, via ethernet, with BDM, will you use an ICE... So do use a cross-compiler, and do use a remote debuger. You don't have a real contact with embedding as long as you stay PCPC104. PC104 is an industrial reality, but you asked about "learning", not doing actual projects. be assure that someone trained on a cross environment will be at ease in a PCPC setup. Considering the target, wich was your question ine the first place: two criteria comes to mind. - supported by gcc - not Intel x86 architecture (see above: cross!) One of gcc main point is the broad range of CPU family it supports. Just say "32 bit" and gcc is there. So time spent on gcc can be recycled on other CPU. BTW I build my first cross-gcc chain using the excellent (even if at the time these were only draft) documentation from Bill. I now I use the RPM from OAR/RTEMS http://www.oarcorp.com They are available for PC host towards most target CPU, binutils+gcc+newlib. At least Motorola 68000, PowerPC, Hitachi SH, of course Intel x86, ARM I think, MIPS maybe + others?
Engineers fresh out of school can't handle this simple task on their own?
Quick! Back to the CULT OF EDUCATION!! Four more years and a couple of 10's of thousand$ more in debt, and maybe a decorative diploma to wallpaper their 1 room apt, and you still have to send them on training?
How about hiring a self-taught guy who bought the kit *on his own* to learn because *he likes electronics*, not because he flipped a coin after high school?
I'm really glad I'm out of electronics! It's just a hobby for me now, but I can still slay 99% of the 'engineers' out there.
Flark!
Check this out:
http://www.intrinsyc.com/products/cerfcube
Although developing applications for a embedded system does not an embedded developer make. An embedded developer should be able to bring up a brain-dead board/system from scratch. They need to know about init'ing the board; CPU (cache, interrupts, etc), memctlr/memory, peripherals, using FLASH (reading, updating, running code from or copying into RAM), updating NVRAM on the fly, handling interrupts, debugging without an ICE or debugger, etc. Do they need a FLASH file system? They need to know how to get information from a schematic and/or a datasheet. These are just off the top of my head. There's a lot of gotchas that embedded application developers never deal with. So training on a SBC/box/whatever that already has an O/S ported and running doesn't teach much embedded development. The dirty work is already done for you.
Someone mentioned pick the tools first. Well that never happens when you develop systems that are to be produced in volume where cost is the main consideration.
"rest assure"
The phrase is rest assured, dumb fuck. It's an imperative, as in "You should sleep well, knowing that..."