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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.'"

7 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. Makes sense.... by GregAllen · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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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  2. How does it go again... by iluvcapra · · Score: 5, Funny

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

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  3. BRIQ by vasqzr · · Score: 5, Interesting


    What happened to the briQ or whatever from YellowDog?

    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.
  4. How fast does it boot? by bergeron76 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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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  5. 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.

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  6. 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.