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uC/uP-Evalboard with modern bus interface??

Hiya folks,

currently i'm looking for some evaluation boards which include a standardized bus interface like VMEbus or PCI or NuBus or something like that.

Just so i can share peripherals like, say some serial interface or Ethernet or something like that among various boards by simply pluggin' in what i need. Sure, there are loads of controllers of any given architecture (ARM, 68k, PowerPC, MIPS, younameit) with about any set of peripherals on-chip. But, one would have to deal with all those different initialization procedures for any combination of those, while with a decent bus interface, one just has some device-specific bus initialization and some standard module initialization which would be common for all architectures used.

Any ideas on where to get such boards without having to cut one's leg off??

TIA, Florian

Reply to
Florian E. Teply
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Probably because once it's working it's not an "eval" board, it's a product.

So why not find a single-board computer with your desired processor and your desired bus?

--

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

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"Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" gives you just what it says.
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Reply to
Tim Wescott

Well, probably because a) i still have no idea on which bus to choose and b) i haven't yet found a single-board computer with in-circuit-debugging/in-circuit-programming facilities like they're found on usual microcontroller eval boards.

But, well, i will look around if i can find something...

Greetings, Florian

Reply to
Florian E. Teply

For the smaller systems today, most peripherals are-on chip, or if not the details of interfacing them depend a lot on how they are hooked up and what environment the code runs under. Take for example the national instruments GPIB chip - code to operate it sitting on an ISA bus in a PC running on baremetal or under dos is different from trying to interface it when running under windows or linux, and different again from trying to run it from microcontroller-of-the-month.

Increasingly in embedded systems that have a little more elbow room, you start to see embedded operating systems with peripheral drivers that may be specific to the peripheral chip but not the host processor, and then application frameworks sitting a level above that. So for example the gadget USB framework under embedded linux should abstract out both the processor specific details and the USB chip specific details, and leave you with just application issues - do you want it to act like a pseudo ethernet, a pseudo serial port, or a mass storage device?

Reply to
cs_posting

PCI and VMEbus seems like better choices than NuBus. And don't forgett PC/104. Maybe VMEbus isn't used with most new systems nowadays.

ARM, PowerPC, MIPS, seems better than 68k.

Also consider if you need MMU/FPU etc.

Reply to
sky465nm

Well, yeah, NuBus seems a tad outdated, haven't seen new NuBus hardware for about 15 years now. Plus it wasn't in wide use anyways apart from late 68k and early PowerPC Macintoshes. And PC/104, wasn't that just ISA on a pin header? Of course with the addition of PCI on another pin header and just recently PCI-Express as well.

Well, as far as i can tell, there are loads of Systems around and lots of hardware to buy. Nearly every flavour of CPU is available in some VME boards.

Probably depends on the application: a small tempreature sensor probably won't need an MMU as it would fit into, say, 2K of memory. And, a VME system would probably be a tad oversized for that task, both technically as well as economically. But if someone would like to run an entire Linux system on it, a MMU would most surely be a great bonus if not a requirement...

Greetings, Florian

Reply to
Florian E. Teply

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