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Mac mini as Embedded Development Platform

Posted by timothy on from the one-for-each-passenger-in-my-car dept.

Ohreally_factor writes "Peter Seebach has written a paper over at IBM developerWorks on the potential use of the Mac mini as a high-end embedded development board. Quote from the article: 'Comparing it to other embedded systems, you'll find that it's not much bigger, and it's smaller than some. It has a broader array of connectors, a faster processor, support for a very large amount of memory, and comes with self-hosted development tools. In short, if you look at it as an embedded development platform, it's a competitive one.'"

4 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. Re:BRIQ by Frequency+Domain · · Score: 5, Informative
    What happened to the briQ or whatever from YellowDog?
    They priced themselves right out of the market. They were asking about $1300, if memory serves, for a 400Mhz G3, and about $500 more to upgrade it to a G4. And that was after their "big price drop." It reminded me of the old joke about trying to make a profit from each of your customers, as opposed to from all of them.
  2. OSX == OSX Lite by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 5, Informative

    OSX is built on Darwin, the BSD/Mach core.

    But drop to a shell and look around - everything is Unix, you can tweak the text-based config files, specify which extensions load, which daemons start, whatever you want.

    There's no voodoo here - so no need for Win98Lite style utilities.

    If you want a simple GUI use X11. If you want Aqua, set autologin and remove all the apps that shouldn't be there.

    For embedded, the cost of Aqua over X11 (OSX over Darwin) may be too high, especially if you can source Mini motherboards directly.

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  3. Re:Not to rain on the parade, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ummm... PIC, AVR, dude, those are pee shooters, of course they are going to be cheaper, they aren't even in the same league. You cannot find a single board computer that runs at 1.25 Ghz, has 256 MB DDR, 32MB Graphics, firewire, USB, 100BaseT, etc. for the same price as the mini. Freescale has their MPC5200 Lite board with a 400 Mhz PowerPC processor for $1000.

  4. Re:When I first saw the Mac Mini by argent · · Score: 4, Informative

    Name one; I'm using my iBook as of current, and I can see almost anything I would need to use a second click for in a menu somewhere.

    You need control-click to bring up contextual manus in many situations. Click-and-hold doesn't work.

    You need command-click or shift-click for multiple selections.

    You need command-click to move or remove menu-bar objects.

    You need control, shift, and option-click all over the place in Photoshop... long one of the "killer apps" for the Mac. In other apps I've run into as much as 2-keys-chorded-plus-double-click.

    In OS 9, which was more consistent about this than OS X, you needed option-click to move the control strip.

    That's just off the top of my head.