Hello,
I am comparatively new to the embedded world and hope to find here some advices and inspirations and maybe answers to the many questions I have.
I am going to develop a distributed application with the following characteristics. A central control programme (probably on a PC) shall talk with a number of embedded devices (microcontroller with sensors and actuators etc.) and the transfer rate shall be relatively high (in fact there are real time issues). Also, the embedded devices shall be hot pluggable meaning that the central control should become immediately aware of a new deviced being plugged into the system. Also, direct communication between the devices shall be possible which suggests a multi-master-bus-protocol.
At first, I had the idea of developing all this Ethernet TCP/IP based and develop all the hot-plug logic on my own. Unfortunately, TCP/IP is too slow and I found that actually firewire is fast enough, cheap enough, it's multi-master and it already has hot pluggability built in!!! (Am I right??)
So my idea is that each device has its own firewire controller which enables communication. In fact, I hope that havnig controller relieves me from all the pain to develop hot-plug-capability for the whole system. IS THAT CORRECT???? The next question was, where can I find nice firewire-controllers or even better a microcontroller with built- in firewire interface which comes with a nice developes kit??? I have found some firewire controllers at TI, but all this information is hardly to understand for a non-expert. I mean, if I buy a firewire controller from TI (for example) - will it come with a development kit or with an API or something like this?? And will can I actually utilize the firewire controller for my own application??? Because firewire also works with the ROM on the chip, but the information on this ROM-chip should obviously different from the information of the ROM-chip of a firewire-camera....so, there are a lot of questions. Here is a list to facilitate answering:
1.) Do you think, firewire is a good choice for my type of application?? (it is an industrial one) 2.) Am I right, that putting firewire controllers on a microcontroller board enables hot pluggability of those microcontrollers straight away?? If not, what else do I have to do then? 3.) Do you know any good firewire products that come with a development kit, so that I could write a "Hello world" between a PC and a microcontroller? 4.) When I buy a fire wire controller from one of the various vendors, will they also provide me with tools to develop my own application based on firewire??- Is there a practical tutorial out there?? For some reason, I could NOT find any code examples or tutorials on firewire....is there actually a good reason for this....???
If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact me. Apart from that I do appreciate any answers to this thread. THANKS.