Just a suggestion

[Alan_37]

Hi
Recently came across these cheap but powerful boards compared to common MCU ‘s
Like the $9 C.H.I.P which uses 1GHZ ARM Cortex-R8 processor with 512MB RAM
and 4GB OF FLASH and even WIFI and Bluethoot , now this is just a Idea/suggestion maybe
for the future and I Know that this could involve a massive amount of work to realize , but imagine
If we could write a flowcode program for these type of boards than Compiling it
To Bash/shell script where we can run on it’s O.S ( Debian linux ).

Don’t know you but I find the idea very interesting and will certainly buy it
If it was available

[EtsDriver]

Couple of weeks back i got looking into mBed platform and the Freescale/NXP K64F board, and tought too that some kind of RTOS running ARM device that would accept Flowcode would be a nice addition!

The multithreading would be a something that removes blockades from holding back some nice components like ModbusTCP!
As for IoT the devices running linux are more and more common, the benefits are:
* The over-the-network updates to kernel and to the user program (can use repositories to update)
* Easyness to create sensor networks and nodes, as ethernet HW is almost free, gives a basic layer for devices to communicate..
* The device could be anythig from small coin sized node to a full scaled router!

*** Daydreaming here: ***
Maybe there should be a way for running FC code using like GPIO.rpi python module... Sky is limit, but that would be a start? (I allready can see the Flowcode V7 for RaspberryPI... )
The C.H.I.P too has a pretty nice GPIO libraries: https://bbs.nextthing.co/t/adafruit-gpi ... -chip/2696

[Steve]

Thanks for the suggestions. We do have plans in this area but it's at an early stage so I don't want to release any details yet.

[JohnCrow]

A few months back Elektor did a feature on a range of development boards. There are a huge range of different types available now.

1 All using different types of processors
2 All using different development IDEs
3 All from different companies

4 To me the most important, they are mostly reasonably priced, say in the region of £50.00 or less.
At these prices, even hobbyists will not be too concerned about investing in one or two of the boards to experiment with.

I realise a lot of these have a very small market compared to Microchip, AVR and ARM, so adding all of them to flowcode would not be economically viable, but as Steve says in the previous post

Thanks for the suggestions. We do have plans in this area but it's at an early stage so I don't want to release any details yet.

I would imagine adding some of the new boards would certainty expand Flowcode's market.

[QMESAR]

4 To me the most important, they are mostly reasonably priced, say in the region of £50.00 or less.
At these prices, even hobbyists will not be too concerned about investing in one or two of the boards to experiment with.

I agree with John 100% with this however getting PIC32MZ(200Mhz device with Ethernet, CAN, Quad SPI, 2MB etc) Curiosity board and even ARM board at below $50.00 is common practice .At the moment my knowledge of the Raspberry and Computer like Board( Still now only about 5% need to deeper investigate more) are that they are nice and powerful to play with as a small computer and give you the possibility to link to sensors and the board give you the bridge to the Internet (cloud) for IoT nice play time stuff however all the examples and the projects found on the internet regarding these boards is once you need to interface to a system that needs Real time operation then it is clearly said to interface the board to a MCU (PIC,AVR,TEXAS ARM etc) which is clear to me for real time real world Embedded application they are just not suitable and can never replace or take the market (I do not know why they are not well suite for real time Embedded my suspicion it is the latency because of the OS and the problem of not haveing the Firmware on the chip itself it needs and SD card (harddrive ) and user intervention for most program execution

I realise a lot of these have a very small market compared to Microchip, AVR and ARM, so adding all of them to flowcode would not be economically viable, but as Steve says in the previous post

I think this is mainly because of the Embedded capabilities of these chips real time acquisition of data end execution of applications

I also do think that they will have a huge market under the hobbyist - computer people but I can not see at this point what benefit they give me as and Embedded system developer,
Sure would be nice if FC support them but if the effort means that support for the Components that FC was designed for Embedded system will suffer under this effort
and causing developers that earns there daily living with FC to have delays in Support and updates then it is questionable to me and I would think to MATRIX as well or I would hope so

I still suffer to understand the real value of these small computer board besides the IoT link to slow acquisition systems as real time stuff as driving a BLDC is not possible due to the lack of real time execution , besides that it nice to play with Linux , IoT etc.
On the contrary an M7 or for that matter PIC32 can publish to cloud or form IoT systems it is actually part of the SW frames supplied by the manufacturer if I just for short think about MPLABx and Harmony why I need these boards for IoT if my micro systems allow me real time operation and all that goes with IoT ?

It would be great if you guys can give me some reasons why to wave a PIC32 or a ARM M7 for example and use these small boards in real world customer and Product development ??

[Benj]

Speaking personally it seems familiar to the days before IBM, e.g. you had a lot of companies all competing to push their platform, Atari, Amega, ZX-81 etc.

Then IBM came along with a stop gap design (x86) and it stuck, much more so then IBM ever dreamed it would.

I think embedded and computing in general is currently undergoing a similar evolution, especially considering things like IoT and AI that are current hot topics.

No doubt eventually things will settle down to just one platform, or a number of distinct platforms with different applications, but for now it's anyone's guess.

We certainly won't be neglecting our core market of simple micros any time soon but the future certainly looks good.