Inexpensive and small RTOS and TCP stack for Coldfire

Okay, I've got the classic dilemna here. As of Friday, we have to build something quickly that works well and costs little. I have to put together a software solution for a small quantity (300) product using a Coldfire 5282.

It will sit between an IP network and a legacy serial interface, converting from one to the other. I have a couple of interrupt drivers to write that have to respond in the 10-20 usec range. For cost reasons, the software footprint is restrained to the internal

5282 memory only (512k flash, 64k ram).

Netburner looks good, but $24.5k is way too steep for this inexpensive product. ThreadX and NetX are the same price. RTXC Quadros is either free for a limited version, $17.5 or $31k. Obviously the free version is attractive, but not sure it will do what we need. I'm looking at Sciopta right now.

Enough rambling. Any opinions or ideas are welcome.

Thanks,

Casey

Reply to
Casey
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If you are in the United States, engineers, fully burdened, cost your employer somewhere between $100,000 and $250,000 per year. That is counting taxes, benefits, physical plant, electricity, support personnel, and what-have-you.

At those rates, $24K is somewhere between 1 and 3 man-months of effort. (In order to get that $100,000 per year figure, your engineer's salary has to be somewhere SOUTH of $50K. TYPICAL corporate overhead runs 105% to 110% of salary. Some places run higher. Some places run MUCH higher. Your management can tell you the actual numbers for your company.)

Reply to
John R. Strohm

Yeah, I know... this is not exactly a revelation.

Or I could just ask the other two guys that own the company. We've been friends for about 15 years now. I'm a consultant, not an employee.

I understand what you're saying, but this product won't fly if we spend $24K. That's $80 a copy for something that doesn't cost much more than that. It doesn't matter whether we spend it on tools or on an engineer (me in this case, and I cost a fair amount). If I find a functional RTOS/IP solution that's a good bit less expensive, we can build the product. Otherwise we can't. No amount of lecturing changes that.

Casey

I started with nothing. I still have most of it.

Reply to
Casey

On Sun, 14 Dec 2003 12:49:51 -0600, Casey wrote: [.....]

Have you considered Nut/OS

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It is simple, has small memory footprint, its sources are pretty well commented and it's free (BSD like licence). It is based on cooperative multitasking model but IMO it shouldn't be a problem in your application. It runs on AVR's although you should be able to port it to Coldfire in 4-5 days.

Regards, /J.D.

--
Jan Dubiec, jdx@slackware.pl, mobile: +48 602 101787

G³êboka wiara wymaga p³ytkiego rozumu i nik³ej wiedzy.
Reply to
Jan Dubiec

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll take a look.

Casey

Reply to
Casey

employer

management

Unlike you, however, any tools can be depreciated and most of their cost recovered through reduction in the company's taxes.

--Gene

Reply to
Gene S. Berkowitz

Have you looked at the several canned solutions on the market for serial-to-TCP? A la XPort from Lantronix, Digi's version, or even SitePlayer? The first two are self-contained in an RJ-45 jack, are programmable to translate your serial interface into TCP, dev kits are in the $1000 range, and per-unit are

Reply to
Richard

Try MicroC/OS-II

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I believe a production license is under $3000. It doesn't have a built-in stack but many are available, including OpenTCP,
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There are Coldfire 5272 ports available on the ucos web site that are easily adapted (if any changes are neeeded).

--
Scott
ExoTech R&D, Inc.
Reply to
Not Really Me

If you haven't already, you should check out CMX and their stack

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I haven't used their comm software, but I had a good experience with the CMX RTOS a few years back. It could be configured to be very small, was relatively inexpensive and the support was good.

Jim McGinnis

Reply to
Jim McGinnis

Thanks, Jim. I'm looking at it now.

Casey

Reply to
Casey

We paid about $US200 for the Lantronix XPort dev kit and $US50 for the device itself. You don't even really need the dev kit, its easy enough to add what little circuitry you do need. Good little device if all you need is a serial to ethernet interface.

Reply to
AVRFreak

The NetBurner modules are ~ $99.00 each at quantity > 100 This includes the S/W license. Could you use such a module?

Paul (I work for NetBurner)

Reply to
pbreed

Unfortunately, no. I did look at your modules as a possible solution, but unfortunately we have some hardware and cost requirements that won't allow that approach. Your module licensing scheme is a good one and I hope it works for others.

Thanks for the suggestion and the disclosure.

Casey

Reply to
Casey

I missed this thread, so may be I'm a bit late.

Porting in 4-5 days may be possible, but Nut/OS is very much

8-bit oriented, producing a lot of overhead for 16/32 bit CPUs.

We've started porting Nut/OS to the ARM platform, which will include removing the 8-bit dependancies, but this may take weeks or months to become perfect. Anyway, there's an increasing interest in a Coldfire port. You may contact Erik at lins dot de.

Regards, Harald

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For spam do not replace spamtrap with my name
Reply to
Harald Kipp

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