On Tue, 4 May 2004 14:12:45 -0700, "Neil Bradley"
<nb_nospam@synthcom.com> wrote:

>I'm working on a project at work that requires a new controller, operating
>system, a network stack, and a myriad of services (ssh, telnet, web,
>etc...). My desires are as follows:
...

Do you want an embedded computer, or an embedded system, if you get my
meaning?

In our experience (we got bitten by the Intel SA-1110 withdrawal),
CPU chips with integral LCD controllers are mostly designed for
PDAs and tend to have short lifetimes for industrial products.
The combination of on-chip Ethernet and LCD is also rare. For
industrial use, the combination of CPU+Ethernet with an external
LCD controller seems to give a hardware solution with lower
product lifetime costs.

Assuming that your response times are modest, you can always use
an on-board bus to link the central controller to slaves for
GPIO. Single chip 60MHz ARMs are cheap these days. Such an
architecture also allows you to decouple the fast/hard real-time
I/O from the nightmares of predicting worst case interrupt
latency and jitter on a SDRAM/cached/MMUed/multitasking *computer*.

Perhaps I'm just feeling grumpy this morning. More caffeine needed!

Stephen
--
Stephen Pelc, stephenXXX@INVALID.mpeltd.demon.co.uk
MicroProcessor Engineering Ltd - More Real, Less Time
133 Hill Lane, Southampton SO15 5AF, England
tel: +44 (0)23 8063 1441, fax: +44 (0)23 8033 9691
web: http://www.mpeltd.demon.co.uk - free VFX Forth downloads

> * 200-600Mhz operation (e.g. PowerPC 440EP and ARM XScale)
> * Instruction cache desirable
> * As many GPIOs as possible
> * At least 1 I2C bus
> * Ethernet
> * At least 16Mb of externally addressable address space
> * SDRAM Controller
> * LCD Controller
> * USB Client and host (1.1 is OK)

If you can live with an Intel/PC104/Industrial PC solution take a look at:
http://www.on-time.com/.

I can highly recommend it (I have no connection with them).  Client side USB
will be the problem with this solution but I get around this using an I2C
USB chip.

Regards, Richard.

http://www.FreeRTOS.org

I'm working on a project at work that requires a new controller, operating
system, a network stack, and a myriad of services (ssh, telnet, web,
etc...). My desires are as follows:

* 200-600Mhz operation (e.g. PowerPC 440EP and ARM XScale)
* Instruction cache desirable
* As many GPIOs as possible
* At least 1 I2C bus
* Ethernet
* At least 16Mb of externally addressable address space
* SDRAM Controller
* LCD Controller
* USB Client and host (1.1 is OK)

I've already taken a close look at the PowerPC 440EP and the Intel XScale
series of CPUs, but I want to make sure I'm not missing anything obvious or
relevant.

Regarding the software stack, I need (in pieces or as a complete package):

* An operating system (have looked at ThreadX, MontaVista Linux, uCOS-II,
eCOS, QNX, LynxOS)
* A network stack, BSD API
* Telnet server, DHCP client, DNS client, SSH server, HTTP (including PHP),
FTP server, TFTP server,
* Simple windowing API for the LCD screen (TinyX or a custom library is OK)
* Drivers for the aforementioned hardware components
* Flash file system
* Remote firmware update capabilities using flash parts
* IPMI 1.5 or higher stack desirable - a bonus

Commercial, fee - does not matter provided that it meets our requirements.
If you're a commercial company and have a product relevant to the above,
please email me with details.

Thanks!

-->Neil