[time-nuts] Do we need something like this ?

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Sun Jun 12 16:02:31 UTC 2005


In message <000001c56f4c$d7597950$03b2fea9 at athlon>, "Ulrich Bangert" writes:

Hi Ulrich,

That's a very interesting project.

I only have one comment:  While the Beck SC12 looks like a fantastic
solution etc, I have always ended up regretting using that sort of
microcontroller.

First off, it has no mass-storage, so I need to ship my measurements
over to some other computer in order to be able to analyse long term
trends and so on, so there went the "stand alone" aspect out of the
door.

Second, a 80186 is non-protected mode, which means that when things
go bad, you get absolutely no clues to what went bad first you only
get one bit of information to debug from:  It all went pear-shaped
really fast.

Third, it doesn't have enough computing power to do all the tasks
well.  One of them: maybe, two of them: almost, three or above:
abyssmall.

Instead I have started using microcontrollers for the real work,
and then I put a soekris computer next to it to do all the
high order stuff and collect long term data.

That way I can fiddle with the high order stuff without disturbing
the real-time stuff, and I have plenty of CPU power for both.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.




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