uC recommendation

[snip]

Your examples cover quite a broad range of potential candidates - especially in terms of achiveable performance. I therefore asume you are not having much experience in this field. Because of this and also asuming this is for a quick project with low quantities I recommend to take a look at the products from Rabbit Semiconductor. They offer core modules and the SDKs come along with software to do what you want (FAT filesystem TCP IP etc). The docs are really good and you will be up and running in a few minutes acutally.

Of course all those uCs you listed could be used for the task and I don't consider any of them to be a bad candidate, but designing a board with all this periphals is a significant amount of work. The core modules therefore will save you a lot.

HTH

Markus

Markus,

Your assumption on experience--wrong. :) Assumption on quick turn/low initial quantities good. We looked at the gumstix solution as well, but because the potential for rather large quantities exists for the end product, we felt that we should be able to get the cost down to ~$50-75 per unit by designing our own hardware.

Seems that the problem I encounter is I can find a cheap uC that includes HW/SW to support either Compact Flash/DOSFs or Ethernet--but not both. Of course, throwing in the added complexity of an RTOS doesn't thrill me. We'd considered a Xilinx FPGA with uBlaze, but felt the development there would be too costly. Our last V2Pro design used VxWorks and was nightmarish in regards to Xilinx's tools. Another reason for not going SoC/FPGA.

I'm going to followup on the rabbit semiconductor recommendation as well. Thanks for the input....

Regards,

Bo

Difficult to meet this ($50) with Xcale. Possible with AT91RM9200. It has Compact Flash support. DOS FAT is just firmware. How much FLASH & RAM?

Included and with firmware

Additional chip

Included

Take a look at the NetBurner MOD5270 We have a CF Fat filesystem in Beta. (We are includeing the HCC embedded file system with our modules in object form.)

Paul

Looks OK, but I'm not sure of our management view of a purchased board vs. developing one though.... I had not considered x86. Not sure I want to either---that's why I got out of the PC/GUI code world.

(Kinda takes all the fun out of it, huh? :)

Seriously though, I'll run it by the project lead....

Bo

Thanks for the link and info. This looks quite promising--- if my management buys into a 'no HW design' approach. How is support? Do you have FAEs? The word 'beta' scares me :)

I must say though that for our application, this seems to be a bit of overkill in terms of processing power. We could probably get by with just the 5213 if there's enough IO to add Compact Flash.I guess we could buy a

5270 development kit, use its schematic as basis for a new board design using the smaller processor but retaining the CF interface???

I expect we will send/receive minimal data over Ethernet--maybe one or two packets per minute. The uarts will be collecting data from a plethora of RS485 type sensors and logging data to the CF. Host then will request CF log data on infrequent intervals....so you can see, not a great need for speed here.

Power may also be a concern. Requirements are in development, but its possible we may need to run on a few AA batteries for several days at a time. I assume that reducing the clk speed is a viable way to do this? Is there a minimum clk required on these devices?

Thanks, Bo

Google for comments on Netburner rin comp.arch.embedded, I think that you would find the answer to this question more valuable from our customers, rather than from an employee. ;-)

Netburner licensed the file system from HCC embedded. The HCC embedded flash file system is not Beta. As shipped from HCC it requires that the customer do some porting integration work. We are now providing this integration and including it in object format. It's this integration with our standard tools and the asociated install, build, make, and link that is beta.

We have a number of customer happily using the HCC embedded file system in shipping applications.

You would need the CF interface and UART drivers. Not a "no HW design" solution. How about a custom order HW solution? We are currently custom building an AT91RM9200 for a client. Other than the CPU, all requirements are similar.

If you have to layout a new board, why not mount the chips on your new board? For $50 each (per 1K), we can build the boards to your specifications. Coldfire 5213 plus a ethernet chip should be enough, in addition to Flash, Ram and etc.

But you need a good enough micro for ethernet. You can use a 8 bits micro to sample and buffer the data.

You can also use the 8 bits micro to suspend/awake the 32 bits micro.

8 bits micro can last for weeks on batteries.

Hi,

As far I remember has one of the parts from Netsilicon the features.....

Regards Jens

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be

CF can be run in IDE mode, and IDE is nothing more than a /CS and a couple of 8/16 bit I/O accesses. This should be very easy to do with all controllers.

Alternative: MMC/SD-Cards. They are smaller, cheaper and can be run in SPI mode, and all controllers should have SPI.

FAT should really no problem unless you are an absolute beginner.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen

Frank-Christian Krügel

Sorry :-)

The RCM2110 should fit the bill. In fact the core does include ethernet and a CF can be connected to the external bus. I know for sure since I did this myself. FAT code along with TCP/IP is also available. The core costs $42 in 1K quantities, which gives another $8 room for the CF connector and power supply. Add to this the CF card you are going to use and you should end up significantly below $75.

Rabbit DOES support both.

There is no RTOS. For an easy project their aproach using state machines and the costatements they use etc. make the job quite easy. I.e. a HTTP server showing pages stored on the CF is IMHO part of the sample code available. I hardly can't imagine to have an easier start.

I fully agree that developement costs would be a lot higher. With the rabbit you hook the CF to the bus and add a voltage regulator and you are done. Again, been there done that.

You are welcome.

Markus

Rabbit offers uC/OS if you need an RTOS.

I concur that Rabbit's tools make it easy to do easy projects. In my experience, however, Dynamic C stops being a tool and becomes an adversary as your project gets larger and more complicated. Thankfully there is an ANSI C compiler available from Softools.

Kelly

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The AT91SAM7X256 contains ARM7 + Ethernet MAC + 256 kB Flash + 64 kB SRAM. The Compact Flash is just some pins and can be handled in S/W. The CPU runs at close to 40 MIPS so this should not be a bottle neck. FreeRTOS has uIP or lwIP TCP/IP Stack. The UARTs should run at pretty high speed w the DMA support.

--
A. P. Richelieu

check the beck SC12 or SC13

99$ 32 pin dil -RTOS + mac + serial +dos