Re: [ECOS] Newbie Questions

["Lewin A.R.W. Edwards" <larwe@larwe.com>]

>The first "project" is to monitor some switches (digital inputs), wait for 
>a short ASCII message from 1 or 2 serial ports, do some simple math on the 
>result, and light some lights using digital outputs.
>Later projects would be more complex, including communicating with other
>microcontrollers controlling various kinds of sensors over serial and 
>ethernet.
>
>I am a software guy, so my bias would be to buy someone else's board, and 
>start writing software for it.  This also would allow the (hopefully) 
>inherent increase in reliability of a commercial board, instead of a 
>one-off custom design.
>
>I have looked through the supported evaluation boards at the ECOS supported
>hardware list, but none seem to be the right set of features.

I think eCos is probably a good match to your needs. It is (or can be) 
small, deterministic and it's open-source. If your application is nice and 
goes through eCos APIs to access the hardware, others who download your 
code will be able to port it to other platforms easily. You've also got 
out-of-box support for

You don't mention whether or not cost is an important factor. If it isn't, 
then I suggest you look at the Cirrus EDB7212 eval board, as it has 
seemingly all your requirements (that you mention, anyway) on-board. You 
would just need to wire up your external switches and lights [with 
appropriate external driver transistors if necessary] and plug in the 
Ethernet cable. However, the Cirrus board will cost you more than US$1500 
per unit.

For my money, it is easier for me to cope with buying a cheap bare-bones 
board like the ARM AEB-1 [now discontinued, replaced by the Evaluator-7T] 
or Atmel AT91EB40, and adding whatever hardware I need externally.

=== Lewin A.R.W. Edwards (Embedded Engineer)
Work: http://www.digi-frame.com/
Personal: http://www.zws.com/ and http://www.larwe.com/

"Und setzet ihr nicht das Leben ein,
Nie wird euch das Leben gewonnen sein."