Hey, a friend and I came up with an idea for a small project. But it requires that i learn how to program for an embedded system. I was wondering if anyone knows of any good tutorials on the web, and a good processor/MCU simulator. And are there libraries for things like handling images and wifi activity?
Thanks for any help.
What kind of project?
For simple stuff, an Arduino is a good starting point, especially if you have no prior electronics experience.
This is what it does essentially.
1. connects to a multicast.
2. wait for incomming information.
3. based on infomation recieved display a picture or text thats already on the system.
4. go back to 2.
Thats basically all it does. My friend took computer engineering classes and so he wants to design the MCU himself. (I think he wants to use the Cortex M3 processor).
A friend of mine uses a J-Link to do a lot of his embed programming (SEGGER Microcontroller - J-Link).
I can ask him for more details this Monday.
Originally Posted by brewbuck:
Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.
Ah so it's not so much embedded is it.
Cortex are ARM CPUs, so they can probably run Linux.
It would be more like a one board computer than embedded system.
Ok thats good for me then :P Im assuming that a normal distro of linux would be a little bit way too much. What are some good distros that would run on something that small, and work with an ARM processor?
It would really depend on the hardware. There are a few tiny Linux distributions for embedded applications. I've never tried any of them, though.
Does most hardware come with drivers for a linux kernel? Or how does that work?
That I have no idea. You may have to write some of your drivers (unless you are using a common consumer chip).
Ok, thanks for the help! I'll probably have more questions when he gets the board built.
