Raspberry Pi and the MagPi

[Dajgoro]

The Raspberry Pi is gaining popularity fast, and there is also the MagPi magazine, and the first issue has been released. The MagPi kinda reminds me of the old 80' computer magazines(i never read them, but i plan to follow this) and i guess that it is going to be very interesting and educative.
It seems that the 80' computer programming era just got a reboot with a bit of the 80' nostalgia.

I think this is worth following and commenting, so i started this topic...

[BigEd]

link for the magazine: http://themagpi.wordpress.com/

I think one of the nice things about the Pi is that it boots from SD card, which is of course swappable. So you can have a number of experimental environments which don't need to co-exist. And although you (probably) have to boot a linux kernel, you don't necessarily have to boot all the way into a full linux distribution with a windowing environment: you could boot straight into some program of your choice, whether a python or native ARM program.

[ChuckT]

Adafruit Prototyping Pi Plate Kit for Raspberry Pi -
http://www.adafruit.com/products/801

An alternative to the Raspberry Pi is:

Olinuxino 1.2 GHz single board computer
http://dangerousprototypes.com/2012/04/ ... -computer/

[BigEd]

Take note - that's a future plan board! Even the 545MHz boards are 'due in May' - see links from pricelist
http://www.olimex.com/dev/pricelist.html

[Dajgoro]

The R-Pi is still cheaper, i just got a email from my local farnell distributer, they will be able to get them August, instead of June... So i guess i wont be seeing any pies soon...
I would also like to try making some arm based projects myself, but i have no idea how to build them...

[ChuckT]

Dajgoro wrote:

The R-Pi is still cheaper, i just got a email from my local farnell distributer, they will be able to get them August, instead of June... So i guess i wont be seeing any pies soon...
I would also like to try making some arm based projects myself, but i have no idea how to build them...

Farnell was charging a $20 shipping and handling fee. The other issues was open source and I may post the issues if I can find them. The Raspberry PI has a chip in it and the major supplier won't issue a very detailed datasheet.

[BigEd]

There's a datasheet here
http://www.element14.com/community/docs ... spberry-pi
with plenty of detail about lots of the on-chip peripherals. What has people upset is that there isn't detail about how to drive the video capabilities, beyond what the closed-source linux video driver allows for. (But that's plenty for most purposes.)

[ElEctric_EyE]

ChuckT wrote:

...The Raspberry PI has a chip in it and the major supplier won't issue a very detailed datasheet.

I wasn't able to find a supplier for the ARM Cortex A8 based Allwinner A13 on the Olinuxino. It looks like they're having the boards made in China. The QFP part is made by a chinese company Allwinner, and doesn't seem to be distributed yet.

[BigEd]

It seems to be worse than that - there's no detailed datasheet, so even less access to peripherals than found on the Pi. But this is all very off-topic - let's stick to products which are at least in production even if supplies are very limited.

To answer Dajgoro's earlier point: have a look at cjb's posting elsewhere (the STM32F4DISCOVERY is a cheap ARM-based dev board with lots of 5V-tolerant I/O - the chip is surface mount but not BGA)

[Dajgoro]

BigEd wrote:

To answer Dajgoro's earlier point: have a look at cjb's posting elsewhere (the STM32F4DISCOVERY is a cheap ARM-based dev board with lots of 5V-tolerant I/O - the chip is surface mount but not BGA)

Yes, but that is only a mcu, with no external bus, i remember seeing some arm mcu that had an external bus interface, where you could add external ram(or maybe hardware?).

[BigEd]

Dajgoro wrote:

BigEd wrote:

To answer Dajgoro's earlier point: have a look at cjb's posting elsewhere (the STM32F4DISCOVERY is a cheap ARM-based dev board with lots of 5V-tolerant I/O - the chip is surface mount but not BGA)

Yes, but that is only a mcu, with no external bus, i remember seeing some arm mcu that had an external bus interface, where you could add external ram(or maybe hardware?).

For sure there are parts with DDR or similar interfaces. I don't think(*) you'll see a general purpose address and data bus like we're used to - you have GPIOs and you have on-chip peripherals, and you have the likes of SPI.

Cheers
Ed
(*)but see cjb's comment below.

[cjb]

Quote:

i remember seeing some arm mcu that had an external bus interface, where you could add external ram(or maybe hardware?).

The STM32F and STM32L (at least) have what's called a 'Flexible Static Memory Controller' (aka FSMC), that among other features, can remap 42 GPIO pins into A[0:25] & D[0:15] as a memory bus to external SRAMs, and the ram then appears as up to 1GB of normal directly-addressable memory.

Friends of mine are pushing for a 65816 simulator next ... I'm thinking for that there's the 512kB SRAMs (like http://tinyurl.com/6oeqknl), which can go onto a simple pin-to-pin daughterboard that sits under the Disco.

NOTE: DON'T BUG ME ABOUT A 65816 SIMULATOR >:E

[Dajgoro]

With this kind of mcu, you only have a more powerful hardware, and (almost?) no more functionality that my sbc has now. The real deal is hiding in soc solutions, and i tried investigating them, but they are all kinda obscure, and until somebody points you the right direction, you don't have a point where to start.
The thing that makes me crazy is that i am right now in the 4. semester, and still i haven't seen any modern hardware(actually i did have some arm assembly once, but only basics in an emulator), right now i have labs with the 8051...

[BigEd]

cjb wrote:

Quote:

i remember seeing some arm mcu that had an external bus interface, where you could add external ram(or maybe hardware?).

The STM32F and STM32L (at least) have what's called a 'Flexible Static Memory Controller' (aka FSMC), that among other features, can remap 42 GPIO pins into A[0:25] & D[0:15] as a memory bus to external SRAMs, and the ram then appears as up to 1GB of normal directly-addressable memory.

sounds interesting - evidently there's a lot to learn.

Quote:

Friends of mine are pushing for a 65816 simulator next ...

You might have a look at lib65816.

[Dajgoro]

BigEd wrote:

cjb wrote:

Quote:

i remember seeing some arm mcu that had an external bus interface, where you could add external ram(or maybe hardware?).

The STM32F and STM32L (at least) have what's called a 'Flexible Static Memory Controller' (aka FSMC), that among other features, can remap 42 GPIO pins into A[0:25] & D[0:15] as a memory bus to external SRAMs, and the ram then appears as up to 1GB of normal directly-addressable memory.

sounds interesting - evidently there's a lot to learn.

Is there some sort of IDE software, or something similar for this sort of arm mcu/cpu?