Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Best Dedicated Low Power Embedded Dev System Choice?
An anonymous reader writes "I'm a Solaris user which is not well supported by the OSS toolchains. I'd like to have a dedicated Linux based dev system which has good support for ARM, MSP430 and other MCU lines and draws very little (5-10 watts max) power. The Beaglebone Black has been suggested. Is there a better choice? This would only be used for software development and testing for embedded systems."
Check out the UDOO: http://www.udoo.org/
A pretty capable machine at a decent price and low power draw. Yes more than a Raspberry PI, but multi cores and real USB controller is worth it (at least for my realtime audio needs).
...why the extremely low power draw requirement? Seems like for a dev box you'd want some horsepower, though you'd want to test on a box that's like your expected production machine...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Any display big enough for development will draw more power than the CPU. (Although I suppose you could kludge some non-backlit e-reader into being a dev system.)
It's my understanding that "install a bunch of gnu tools" is the first thing that many Solaris sysadmins do on a new system.
Anyway, why do you need a low-power ARM system? The description heading mentions "embedded", but your description mentions irrelevant stuff like Solaris, but not the important stuff like what sort of embedded work you'll be doing: industrial control, point-of-sale, sensor monitoring, etc, etc ad nauseum.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Emacs! Oh wait, wrong flame war..
The OP doesn't need Solaris (He currently has a Linux Dev box) or an ARM system. He needs a low powered machine that can compile to ARM (and other things).
I would look into an Intel NUC.
You can get a netbook that will draw around 5-10W. If you get one with intel cpu and chipset you will have the advantage of massive compatibility, especially if you skip the original Atom chip. Once the dual cores came out it was pretty well abandoned by everyone.
That, or get one of these ~$100 android units which also runs Debian. But I don't really recommend that. The only one which seems very performant and yet inexpensive is the mk908 which is a bit of a turd reliability-wise and which doesn't yet have complete hardware support, e.g. http://www.cnx-software.com/20...
I stand by the netbook
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Do yourself a favor and order a Shuttle DS437, I bought one myself and cannot think of a better little box for playing with embedded systems. Here's why:
It's "only" 1.8Ghz, but we're talking Ivy Bridge here, not some wimpy Atom or ARM core. Plus, in my experience you really want x86 for your host machine. Not every compiler or tool you might want to use is going to be supported on, say, a lower-powered ARM system.
I considered a lot of exotic ARM boards as my development host, including BeagleBone, Jetson-K1, and a handful of others. I think the D437 leads by a wide margin, but for what its worth I considered the Jetson-K1 board a distant runner-up.
The ARM architecture has some fairly good Linux support and wide adoption.
One of my favorites out there today is the A10-OLinuXino-LIME This is a low cost 1GHz ARM board with a Mali-400 GPU, a SATA port, 100BT port, two USB ports for under $50. I'm a big fan of the SATA port... using a SSD for the system solves many reliability problems. It also has support for LIPO battery but I haven't tried it.
Perhaps the best value/performance is the Wandboard QUAD. Quad iM.6 with 2GB Ram, WiFi, SATA, and an OpenCL supported Vivante GC 2000 all for $129. For the price it can't be beat... though the power consumption may be a bit higher than other small embedded systems..
The most popular two boards out there seem to be Beagle Bone and Rasperry PI. I'm not big on either...
The Beagle Bone was good in its day, but it is kind of over the hill. The processor is underpowered compared to other ARMs out there today for the same price/power consumption. Its peripherals are limited to essentially one USB 2.0 port and a bunch of multifunction IO on a header - which may be useful if you are hobbying. The one USB2.0 limits storage options. Because of the poor reliability of MMC, I prefer to use SSD these days, which means I need a USB drive enclosure of some type and need to get a hub if I want other USB. With all this, I'm still stuck at 2.0 speeds on the SSD.
The other issue with the Beagle Bone is that the processor is kind of on a dead end in terms of development cycle. That is, TI is not actively developing new OMAPs, but they have been authoring most of the Linux drivers for these chips. TI will continue to produce the OMAPs that are on the Beagle Bone, but I wonder how much they will continue to support driver development for future Linux.
Raspberry PI is useful for what it was designed as, an educational tool. But as an embedded processor it is not that great, kinda overhyped. The boot option is very limited - boot loader must reside on an SD. Also, Raspberry PI hardware is not open source. The Broadcom processor most nifty feature is a closed sources GPU, and the hardware requires a mysterious bin blob to boot properly. It is a toy.
Don't buy anything today. Wait until there are media boxes with quad Cortex A15/A17 chips and buy one of them. They'll be out any week now. Rockchip RK3288 is coming, should be affordable, and the company is spending a lot of effort making sure it's well supported in mainline.
Cortex A9 hails from 2007. It's ancient. The GPUs are at best old Mali-400's. The compute/watt is not-great.
If you want to go really low power- if battery life is your concern and you don't actually have serious CPU use (you mention MSP430, so it sounds like you don't have real CPU use needs) get a Cortex A7 or Cortex A5. There are dozens of dual core Allwinner A7 boards out there. A5 has slimmer pickings, but will get you pleasantly below the one watt range, and the boards come with more embedded targeted peripherals that might not be included on media devices.