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Now where have I seen this before? I've seen it somewhere... I'm not sure. But can't it be used for something like, a tiny computer? It wasn't supposed to be a tablet. It was like a mini laptop, with a keyboard and all. Hm...
Registered Member #3414
Joined: Sun Nov 14 2010, 05:05PM
Location: UK
Posts: 4245
Having read the specs, it seems the Raspberry Pi 'should' be suitable for using as a PLC(?) for controlling an MKS pressure control system for my vacuum system.
I'm hoping it will be suitable for controlling (and monitoring) everything else involved in the project as well, which will involve a magnetron based plasma source (proton source), and electrostatic accelerator (see my other threads on magnetrons, HV transformers and voltage multipliers), MKS mass flow controllers, etc.
Although I will have to use an RS232 interface for the MKS stuff, I'm assuming it will be relatively straightforward to incorporate USB/serial port adaptors, etc. into the Raspberry Pi based system.
(Does anyone else have plans to use one for controlling their projects?)
Registered Member #3414
Joined: Sun Nov 14 2010, 05:05PM
Location: UK
Posts: 4245
Just received this e-mail from RS:
Dear Customer
Thank you for joining the Raspberry Pi revolution and registering your interest in Raspberry Pi’s Model B board from RS Components.
We have received extraordinary levels of demand for this product. To help ensure as many people as possible can experience the Raspberry Pi concept, we are initially limiting boards to one per customer, and we will send you regular updates on availability. As boards arrive into stock, they will be allocated on a first-come first-serve basis, in order of when requests were received.
Thank you for your patience; we will be in touch as soon as possible with more details.
RS Components
(I feel like adding an expletive, but I'll try my best to control myself)
Registered Member #30
Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706
Pinky's Brain wrote ...
If you want to say attach some fast ADCs you're going to need a lot more GPIO.
Well, does the thing have a real-time operating system capable of turning the handle on a fast ADC and managing the data flow from it?
The board has SPI and I2C, which suits plenty of ADCs and DACs. Assuming the developers bothered to write drivers for those buses. I once had to deal with an I2C driver that inserted a 1ms delay between bytes. It ended up quicker to bit-bang some GPIO lines.
Gone are the days when you could just Peek and Poke the hardware directly. It's especially sad that you can't do this in an educational product.
As for RS232: I bet it has an undocumented RS232 port, hooked up to some pads on the PCB, that spews debugging information at boot time. You may be able to open it as a regular serial port later. The USB to serial converters will require a driver. FTDI have a lot of drivers for weird OSs, but if the Raspberry Pi OS doesn't provide a mechanism for installing drivers, that may not help. Still the FTDI chips are so popular that the driver might be included already.
Registered Member #1334
Joined: Tue Feb 19 2008, 04:37PM
Location: Nr. London, UK
Posts: 615
Steve Conner wrote ...
Pinky's Brain wrote ...
If you want to say attach some fast ADCs you're going to need a lot more GPIO.
Well, does the thing have a real-time operating system capable of turning the handle on a fast ADC and managing the data flow from it?
The board has SPI and I2C, which suits plenty of ADCs and DACs. Assuming the developers bothered to write drivers for those buses. I once had to deal with an I2C driver that inserted a 1ms delay between bytes. It ended up quicker to bit-bang some GPIO lines.
Gone are the days when you could just Peek and Poke the hardware directly. It's especially sad that you can't do this in an educational product.
As for RS232: I bet it has an undocumented RS232 port, hooked up to some pads on the PCB, that spews debugging information at boot time. You may be able to open it as a regular serial port later. The USB to serial converters will require a driver. FTDI have a lot of drivers for weird OSs, but if the Raspberry Pi OS doesn't provide a mechanism for installing drivers, that may not help. Still the FTDI chips are so popular that the driver might be included already.
There are several O/Ss being targeted for the RPi, including at least one RTOS - it is, after all, just a well-packaged ARM11 with some sexy peripherals. There are two UARTs, at least one of which is available on the GPIO pin header (un-level-shifted) as just TXD/RXD (no flow control) which can be used as the console. The schematics will be released fairly soon...
Even though I pre-ordered mine some time ago, I'm not due to get it before end of April. There's been a manufacturing/QA cockup - the Chinese fab they are using silently replaced the Ethernet jacks with cheaper ones that look identical but don't have embedded magnetics, so all of them have to be re-worked and 100,000 (I kid you not) new ones sourced... See for details...
Registered Member #27
Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 02:20AM
Location: Hyperborea
Posts: 2058
Gone are the days when you could just Peek and Poke the hardware directly. It's especially sad that you can't do this in an educational product.
Install RISC OS, boot into BBC BASIC and hammer away at the hardware, the peripherals have the registers documented. That is my plan, at least until my own "OS" has a usable compiler and assembler.
Registered Member #30
Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706
Sounds like some proper retro fun!
The last time I tried something like this, I found that the processor (a PXA270) had a memory management unit. Before I could access a hardware register, I had to request the MMU to map it into my process address space and then keep track of the new virtual address that it gave me.
And since the OS wouldn't allow a user-mode process to use the MMU, I ended up having to write a kernel-mode driver.
The Broadcom chip will undoubtedly have a MMU, so hopefully RISC OS will be a bit more accommodating or even just disable it completely. In the above case, I would have given up out of frustration several times if someone hadn't been paying me to do it.
Nicko, where did you get all this information, do you have raspberry spies?
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Good. God.
