Doesn't that depend on where he's headed? I recommended the PC104 route only because he said he wanted to work toward a robotic system and he has programming experience on the PC. PC104-packaged PC-dlookalikes are pretty available, though they're not cheap. They do offer him the opportunity to put a PC in his robotic system, which might just meet his needs.



I think you may have misunderstood my remarks. I don't condemn any of the options, but simply pointed out that, with Jacob's prior experience coding for the PC, a PC-lookalike would be a short path to where he wants to go. I don't recommend Windows for that, but DOS would probably fill the bill.


I think there's quite a lot of misinformation bandied about in the MCU community, particularly about the benefit of using 32-bit MCU's rather than 8-bitters, mostly because the persons involved haven't made actual objective comparisons in a wide range of applications. I agree that, where a task is computing intensive most 32-bit architectures offer advantages. However, in many low-level applications, the 8-bitters just fit the task better.

I'm presently playing with an instruction set implementation that is tailored for those low-level applications where performance on small data units is important. Sort-of like what the old 8x300 did with I/O processing when 300ns per instruction was considered to be very fast. 8-bitters deal with single bytes very well, while few 32-bitters do that as well. Maybe there's another way ... but that should go in a different thread under CHAT.

Mayabe, one of these days ...

RE