Embedded goodness
I've had my eye on Technologic's TS-7800 for a minute. It's a nice computer, but ultimately the 10-bit A/D converter just didn't have adequate resolution for my purposes. I've been looking at PC/104 Analog IO boards, including Diamond System's offerings, but I finally opted for something rather different, an ARM Cortex microcontroller prototyping board designed by Olimex.
The CPU integrates two 12-bit ADCs, and is rather powerful for a microcontroller. The board itself is minimal and provides few peripherals. Indeed, it provides almost no logic elements, providing only communication devices that are more-or-less directly supported by the CPU. Instead, most of the CPU's pins are extended, and even integrates a small perf board for wire-wrapping! This should make it pretty easy to add whatever peripherals are needed to get the job done.
Though the Cortex-A (application) and Cortex-R (realtime) variants are fully backward compatible, the Cortex-M (microcontroller) CPUs support the Thumb-2 instruction set only, which is a superset of the Thumb instruction set that debuted on the ARM7 family of processors. Yup. The original ARM instruction set is no longer directly supported by this CPU.
Oh my, SparkFun is tight! Their website is more user-friendly than DigiKey, and they have some good prices! While I salivated over their sensors, none of them are really applicable to my current project, sadly. (Wait until I have the money for an model airplane/helicopter, though...)
And, speaking of tight, I want a Pandora rather badly. I'm impatiently waiting for that to come out.
The CPU integrates two 12-bit ADCs, and is rather powerful for a microcontroller. The board itself is minimal and provides few peripherals. Indeed, it provides almost no logic elements, providing only communication devices that are more-or-less directly supported by the CPU. Instead, most of the CPU's pins are extended, and even integrates a small perf board for wire-wrapping! This should make it pretty easy to add whatever peripherals are needed to get the job done.
Though the Cortex-A (application) and Cortex-R (realtime) variants are fully backward compatible, the Cortex-M (microcontroller) CPUs support the Thumb-2 instruction set only, which is a superset of the Thumb instruction set that debuted on the ARM7 family of processors. Yup. The original ARM instruction set is no longer directly supported by this CPU.
Oh my, SparkFun is tight! Their website is more user-friendly than DigiKey, and they have some good prices! While I salivated over their sensors, none of them are really applicable to my current project, sadly. (Wait until I have the money for an model airplane/helicopter, though...)
And, speaking of tight, I want a Pandora rather badly. I'm impatiently waiting for that to come out.