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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.'"
...I thought of the DARPA project. Or how cool it would be to have a Mac in a car anyways. One button mouse makes it easy to while in a figity car.
I for one welcome our new Mac Mini overlords.
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For quite some time, we've used PowerBooks as embedded platforms. They are typically cheaper, faster, lower power, and easier to get than similar VME solutions with a PowerPC. Packaging is a bit of an issue, but the benefits have outweighed the problems. There's a large market for embedded x86 PCs, why not PPC with AltiVec?
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The machine is great , small, compact , silent , powerfull , has a unix with full driver support for all included components ,Excelent development tools and a price that is unmatched in the area . . . ,Ive used apple computers for a long time but never have i found an apple that was this versatile .
I use my mini as a general purpose slim line as well as a digital hub.
Whilst i read through this , i cant help myself saying "Exactly" out loud , Apple has one hell of a commodity/general purpose computer on its hand in the mini
seriously how many other mainstream computers can equaly compete in the Digital hub and embeded development market, OS X allows me the power of a unix system which I use daily and allows the system to be so easy that an adult with no experiance ( children pick GUI navigation up too easily to be worth mentioning) could use it quickly
Bravo apple , this machine made me break out the wallet the minute it was announced
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And with the price of the Mac Mini, it's a great way for Unix/Linux developers to test ports of their software to Darwin/OS X, or a great way to learn Cocoa or Mac programming in general.
What happened to the briQ or whatever from YellowDog?
The problem with a "lite" version is what do you take out? Two different people might both want a cut down version (especially if it cost less), but person A might want to retain a certain feature that person B thought was not required.
An alternative would be a "what do you not want / need" installer which would run when the machine was first powered up. It would have to include a short sentence or two to explain why you might want to throw out feature X.
At present, an OS X custom install has a few options (like foreign languages, printer drivers, X windows, BSD subsystem and so on), but nothing as radical as "don't need this - remove"
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Don't get me wrong, he knows what's up, but... it's not clear he's an expert in some of the more subtle areas, like Open Firmware- the 'zap the PRAM three times' function is supposed to clear the Open Firmware password, as an example. He seems to be more of an embedded systems guy rather than an Apple hardware geek, that's all.
One of the major draws to embedded boards is the boot time.
Unless it beats my current 3 second embedded solution, I won't be investing in it as an option.
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