microcontroller networking

What SICK man network fourteen 8-bit AVRs?

The related project looks very interesting:

I'm experimenting with using (smaller) clusters of 8-bitters for low-power processing/splitting a single UART input, that's sending large amounts of serial data from one input into multiple serial outputs but where not all of them might be in use at any one time, or one output needs a lot of processing done at a given time but the others aren't sending much. so you might be able to have two or more processors collaborate.

Sort of like those V8s that can shut down cylinders when highway cruising and V8 power not required.

I don't know yet if this will have any actual power savings/cost advantage to using one big f*ck-off fast ARM to do everything but is fun to experiment with.

Most ARMs don't have the required number of UARTs on board for output anyway so you'd have to buy some i2c to multi-UART bridge chips or something if you want niceities like hardware FIFO buffering and they tend to be expensive, more expensive than an 8 bitter with its own onboard UART. and they tend to come from Maxim...

Reply to
bitrex
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Use an SOC, like a ZYNQ or one of the new cheaper ones, and roll as many uarts as you have pins to spare.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

To clarify yes battery operation is a requirement. AA cells, probably.

Reply to
bitrex

what's the price break on those? Dunno if I have the budget for it. ARM-9 seems like overkill for the job....

These OTP mixed-signal FPGA-things look neat I believe Apple is using them now for doing in-house battery management-stuff. They're cheap maybe 25-50 cents in quantity for the lower-end models and might have enough logic on board to do a poor man's i2c-UART. they have memory. they got a user-definable state machine.

Reply to
bitrex

I don't need multiple inputs, just i2c to FIFO-buffered outputs, ideally.

Reply to
bitrex

Years ago, I made a board consisting of 27 ATMega's networked with one more ATMega, using SPI as multi-master bus.

Every slave had a flash chip along, and the whole thing was used for production flashing of a batch of 27 target controller boards at a time. The flash chip contained the code to download.

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-TV
Reply to
Tauno Voipio

Beats my best of 13 cpu's on a VME board.

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(12 of mine are electrically isolated from ground. Each is a floating

4-20 mA i/o/dac/dvm channel.)
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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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Reply to
John Larkin
14000 MCUs

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Reply to
Lasse Langwadt Christensen

I haven't looked at the video. But in general, you network lots of small processors when you want them physically or electrically isolated. You don't spread processing amongst multiple AVR chips - not when you can get a single ARM that is smaller, cheaper, lower power and has 20 times the processing power of the AVR.

Many cheap Cortex-M4 microcontrollers have 3-5 UARTs. I've seen bigger devices with 8 UARTs. How many do you need?

Reply to
David Brown

They have very limited logic capability. It would have to be a very simple function you are programming and I'm pretty sure they can't do i2c-UART unless you find one with both built in. Only a couple of versions have in system programmability.

Rick C.

Reply to
gnuarm.deletethisbit

That's a pretty cool project.

Rick C.

Reply to
gnuarm.deletethisbit

il.com:

Mike has done quite a few cool projects,

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Reply to
Lasse Langwadt Christensen

I guess you had pissed off your boss. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

+1

He used to be a semi-regular poster here.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

My goals are more modest by a longshot but yeah, if I need say eight UARTs the ATTiny414 is 39 cents each in quantity how do I get hardware UARTs much cheaper than that. I don't think an ARM core with 8 UARTs is going to be as cheap.

And then if the processing requirements are fairly modest why do I need an ARM at all let the "UARTs" do the data crunching, too

Reply to
bitrex

There's nothing to stop you connecting one UART output to multiple UART inputs, provided you're not using any kind of flow control.

You can even run multiple outputs to one input if there's coordination so that only one output drives the pin at a time.

Sylvia.

Reply to
Sylvia Else

In this case it is time to change the company. Some years ago I used an R32/116 from Reneses. It has 9 serial interface and they can be configured to I2C, UART or IEBUS.

Oh and there are also 11timer inside...

So sometimes it is a good idea to look above the own fences.

Olaf

Reply to
olaf

Or just not limit yourself to MCUs.

Rick C.

Reply to
gnuarm.deletethisbit

On a sunny day (Sat, 16 Feb 2019 17:02:07 -0500) it happened bitrex wrote in :

It would be a good thing for all those who want chips with many UARTs to learn to do those in software. Same goes for SPI and I2C. But then maybe 'see' is not the prefered language, asm makes more sense.

For example I use software UART many times and never even use hardware SPI or I2C, not even on any platform.

Reply to
<698839253X6D445TD

MCUs are very effective hammers.

Reply to
Tom Gardner

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