Mac mini as Embedded Development Platform

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.'"

Comments

Re:it's part of the reason i bought one (kind of')

[superpulpsicle]

Come on now, you can get all of that on a PC labtop. If you like the MiniMac design, that's great. But don't make it seem like a Sager labtop or a souped up Alienware can't be a digital Hub either.

Re:When I first saw the Mac Mini

[argent]

Unfortunately the Mac OS interface is not designed to work with a single button. There are a lot of thing you need to use control- option- or command- click to do, and shift-click is often nearly as critical.

Really, the Mac has a 5 button mouse with 4 of them on the keyboard.

Oh well...

[curious.corn]

very true, a mini is a hell of a cool device but I only wish for someone to discover an unfinished header port on the mini's logic board and find out it's a JTAG. Now, that'd make the mini the most 'leet toy ever (it makes debugging a live OS the same as with your user level app... but you can mess with the ram, chipset, CPU, rollback contexts, like the CPU light panels on '70 room sized mainframes... wet dreams... wet dreams ;-) )

Re:Makes sense....

[SA Stevens]

In most instances VME form-factor hardware is rated to a very high reliability. Likely more than a consumer-grade Powerbook.

Probably a useful cheap-and-dirty solution, though.

Not to rain on the parade, but...

[Space cowboy]

... it's a bloody expensive embedded system - most of these are $1-200, not $500. The popular ones are $100 (Rabbit, Arm, AVR, PIC)

Don't get me wrong, I think the Mac mini is just fabulous, but you'd have to have a damn good reason to pay the premium over more traditional embedded systems...

Simon

Re:Nope

[bussdriver]

HIGH-END embedded systems.
they are NOT cheap.

The mac isn't limited to one button

[arete]

MacOS has supported _12_ mouse buttons for years - it might be more now. Of course, this is assuming the application has something to do with 12 mouse buttons.

Here's what you do: Buy a mac mini. Buy a USB mouse with more buttons. Plug it in. Done.

Apple specifies that basic application functions should be available with a single button - so that novice users can always use the apps, and to discourage arbitrarily hiding functions in context-menus.

Generally the context-menu (right-click) is ALSO mapped to ctrl-click. The middle click is mapped also, but I can't remember if it's mapped to option/alt or to cmd/appl.

As to Photoshop - compared to PCs, I think they're essentially even, because Macs have an additional modifier button - shift cmd/appl, option/alt and ctrl

Dual Ethernet Ports

[eluusive]

I'd buy one if it had two ethernet ports. Think of what a leat--yet small--router you could have. My current webserver/router/firewall/dhcp/dns/etc server is a 466mhz celeron I found in a dumpster and replaced the hard drive on. heh. At least it has two NIC cards though.

Better than a self-hosted web-cam

[JawzX]

Mac Mini (w/ airport) + iSight + Darwin Streaming Server = Kicks any self-hosted web-cam's ass. As matter of fact we just did one of these for a local bar. It was a little more expensive than a self hosted cam, but it does synched audio, supports simultanious streams at different bandwidths, and can handle more than twice the user load. It sits headless on a shelf high on a wall, the iSight right next to it, it connects to the network wirelessly and we VNC into it... it's a perfect comodity device!