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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.'"
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...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.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
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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poo
Having said all of that I'm looking forward to PART II!
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
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.
No 9 pin, less space than a Cappucino. Lame. :)
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
What happened to the briQ or whatever from YellowDog?
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My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
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.
Tom Delay followed the orderly through the halls of the hospice. He was more than a little nervous at the idea of meeting Terri: hospitals made him a bit egdy. Nevertheless, he believed this to be a big item for his constituents, and he marched proudly to see this wonderful dying woman.
Eventually they reached the room and he asked the orderly to leave him alone with her for some 'personal prayer time.' The orderly obliged and left him there. Tom noticed that the lights were somewhat dim. Why not, he thought. It's not like this vegetable will need them. Tired after a long day with some of the fundamentalists outside the hospice he threw himself into a chair and began to think the situation over. He knew he'd already won big points with the religious crowd, but he hoped to find a way to score even bigger. Leaving the hospice and claiming that Terri had spoken to him through prayer was one idea that came to mind, but he immediately dismissed it as a little too outlandish. He needed something simple.
Heh, she's certainly livelier than my wife is, he thought to himself bitterly. He cast his eyes over at the faintly stirring Terri, who was staring at the ceiling with those lovely dark eyes and drooling quietly to herself. I have to admit, she was a beautiful woman once. But now she's just old. Terri here, though... the lack of intelligence notwithstanding, she has a simple charm to her. A simple charm that a down home Texan like myself might appreciate.
Tom quietly chastised himself for such thoughts. Granted, he may have become bitter after years of loveless marriage, and the semi-private hospital room did afford him some freedom to exercise thoughts that might otherwise accidentally slip out in public... but. But what? Tom took a moment to wrestle with his conscience. Lord, I know this to be wrong, but....
'It's a crying shame that such a lovely young lady might suffer such a painful death without a few final... comforts,' he said to himself, slightly surprised that he'd managed to work up the courage to entertain the notion. Still, was it not his duty as a good Christian to ease the suffering of this woman? He was, after all, only trying to elicit some sort of response. She would not respond as much as some women would, but then, Tom liked them that way. 'I suppose, my dear, that your last worldly affair might save me some rohypnol.'
Tom stood and checked to be sure that the door was closed and latched before he unbuckled his belt as quietly as possible... not an easy task with the giant buckle he had that complied with all Texas rules and regulations for belt buckle sizes. Without letting his pants slip he moved to sit beside her on the bed. Terri still didn't respond. Tom tentatively reached out a hand to fondle her breasts through the flimsy hospital gown, immediately feeling his member stiffen as he did so. He gently found her nipples through the gown and pinched them, though he got no response from her. Good...
He slowly removed what he could of the gown, though he was too busy keeping his pants on to do a proper job of turning her over to remove the whole thing. Instead he managed to get most of the front of her uncovered and let his hands wander and explore her, pausing a moment as he came across the hole where her feeding tube was missing. Idle thoughts flitted through his mind as he fingered it, but they fled and he continued his searching, until he found her surprisingly neatly trimmed bush.
As he gently tickled her glorious labia he found it impossible to resist rubbing himself through his clothes. All the while he was watching her face intently, hoping for some sign of life. But not too much life, he cautioned himself. Persistently vegetative women tell no tales.... Fortunately she was still contentedly drooling... from both sets of lips! He brought his fingers to his nose and took a good whiff of the acrid goodness thereupon.
Suddenly he heard a few sets of footsteps outside! With all the quickness he could muster he re-buckled his belt and tried
I would have loved to use a Mac Mini for this home-brewed embedded project I have. Unfortunately, the Mac Mini has no PCI support. Instead I'm now using a TAMS 3011 MOAB. It's not as good of a value as a Mac Mini and has some limitations, but it does have PCI.
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 ;-) )
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
... 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
Physicists get Hadrons!
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.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
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!
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Whenevery I read these Apple-sponsored advertisements ("Articles"), I want to:
- spank Steve Jobs on his naked butt for creating a good operating system but making it available only on a ridiculously childish and underpowered platform
- shit CumTaco down his neck for being a ugly fucker
(I admit that the last point may be considered off-topic.)
Hi. This is me with my iPod.. I'm pretty cool, huh?
HIGH-END embedded systems.
they are NOT cheap.
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One of the nice things about doing embedded development on Windows boxes is the availability of cheap parallel-port BDM/JTAG interfaces, like Macraigor's Wiggler. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be an easy way to connect these to the USB ports of any Mac (the parallel port to USB converters that are used for printers reportedly don't work). I'm looking forward to the day that I can buy a cheap USB-compatible Wiggler that GDB can talk to.
He's not exactly a novice. He does mention that zapping the PRAM three times is supposed to do extra things, but claims that might be superstition-- he does mention that he hasn't had to do that on a "modern machine," I don't know exactly what that means, but I suspect the last time he zapped the PRAM was when his G3 tower was high-end.
A little background about Seebs: he's been on Usenet since junior high (the mid-1980s), which in this case means using Unix on a VAX. He's used Macs for decades, though his primary machine has typically run Unix. (Even though OS X is BSDish, he still does a lot on straight FreeBSD.) And lately he's been doing a lot of embedded work. For the record, I'm the one who gave him the news about the Mac Mini, and I did have my pinky in the side of my mouth and called it mini-mac.
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
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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.
Zapping the PRAM doesn't reset the OF passwd. Assuming a password is set, you need physical access to the mainboard.
A four-key-at-boot workaround would make OF passwd sercurity a bit useless, wouldn't it?
-- often wrong; never in doubt
You guys are not alone on the desire to call it a mini-mac. I have to try really hard to type "Mac mini"... I think "big M-a-c little mini" or I get it all wrong ( including the capitalization, it's branded to match the iPod mini ). Steve and company wanted to brand it like that for some sort of reason ( they don't want it to be percieved as a joke, I guess ), but it'll always be the mini-mac to us, eh?
On the Apple Newton, to draw a contextual menu, one needs to do a "tap and a half." The user taps quickly, and then taps again holding the pen to the screen.
I suppose that this could be interprited as a "right click." Although, whether that is an option-click, apple-click, or control click... is anone's guess.
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!
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The iMac got replaced. The Mac Cube is long gone. The lampshade is on its way out. Apple constantly innovates and comes out with something new. In embedded systems, you need something that probably isn't as exciting as an Apple system, but that will remain stable and available for years to come, with no or minimal changes. Otherwise, you are asking for trouble.
As NASA said, test what you fly and fly what you test. You can't design something, change the computer at the last minute, and expect it to be fine, even if all the software still works. There are electrical noises, temperature considerations, EMI, RFI, and all kinds of other fun things that will keep you chasing shadows for months. Embedded projects fail over this kind of thing.
I would LOVE to use some Apple box in an embedded system... but Apple would have to release such a box as one that is INTENDED for embedded applications, and they would need to promise continued production for a number of years.
Tell 'em "These are not the names you are looking for."
Better yet, screw the Jedi training and slash 'em. Then give their families a free printer two days after.
(If Yoda asks, blame it on those midi-chlorians.)
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
I own about a half-dozen macs. I know what zapping the PRAM officially does. I also know that people in comp.sys.mac.system will recommend it for anything from "machine won't boot" to "SCSI termination problems". I don't know whether it has side-effects that we don't really know about.
I'm not exactly a Mac expert, but I do write about 'em a lot.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I have come to appreciate using key chords. it keeps my left hand busier and has cut way down on the tendinitis pain I had with 2 and 3 button dependency.
it does get ridiculous in 3D applications though where with things like houdini and maya etc. you have chords with both the mouse AND the keyboard.
oddly, one of apple's own products, (though only recently purchased,) shake, REQUIRES the use of a 3 button mouse. this if nothing else should convince people that macs and apple are fully conversant with multiple button mice. (this does make it a pain to run shake on a laptop, but the 3 buttons on your average Wacom tablet are better.)
and to the grand parent, as far as I know, multiple selections on windows with a 2 or 3 button mouse still requres the use of shift of control. has this changed
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
In one of the articles for this small computer it was noted you can get a "Happy Hacking keyboard" to use with it instead of a regular sized one. I looked at the price of the Happy Hacking keyboard and was shocked. Can anyone explain why someone would pay upwards of US$125.00 for a keyboard which is slightly smaller than usual ones when a typical regular size keyboard, brand new, sells for US$3.95? (That's what I paid about a month ago at Micro Center for the brand-new keyboard I am using right now and that they are still selling.) Are the esthetics of a smaller keyboard worth 30 times the price? And why someone would pay over $125.00 for a keyboard for a machine that costs $495.00?
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.