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

When I first saw the Mac Mini

[ciroknight]

...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.

Re:When I first saw the Mac Mini

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

One button mouse makes it easy to while in a figity car.

More importantly, an interface designed to work with a single button makes specialized interface devices much easier to implement.

Re:When I first saw the Mac Mini

[argent]

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.

Makes sense....

[GregAllen]

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?

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

[FidelCatsro]

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 .
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 ,Ive used apple computers for a long time but never have i found an apple that was this versatile .

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

[FidelCatsro]

Yes for about double the price , ;) i do own an IBM thinkpad from 2003 and i love it to bits , however it realy is not in the same market .The mac mini is no games device granted , but for my needs its a god send

And with the price...

[jnetsurfer]

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.

How does it go again...

[iluvcapra]

No 9 pin, less space than a Cappucino. Lame. :)

BRIQ

[vasqzr]

What happened to the briQ or whatever from YellowDog?

Re:BRIQ

[Frequency Domain]

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.

Re:OS X "Lite"

[BeerCat]

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"

not written by a Macintosh expert, and that's cool

[javaxman]

You know what's most interesting to me about this article? The fact that it's written by a guy who is clearly not actually very expert on things Apple. I find the fact that he's not seriously an Apple guy very cool, and very indicative that Apple's really done something different with the introduction of the Mac mini.

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.

How fast does it boot?

[bergeron76]

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.

OSX == OSX Lite

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

Re:Not to rain on the parade, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:OS X "Lite"

[Frodo Crockett]

What the frack is a MiniMac ? This reminds of people who say "American Online" instead of America Online ...

That's not so bad. I work in retail, and I have to put up with people who say "98 Windows" on a regular basis. Also note that "Lexmark" is frequently mis-pronounced as "Lensmark", "Lamar", and, inexplicably, "Linux". Were it not for my Jedi training, I fear I might do something rather violent to these people.