On 19 October 2013 23:15, Wayne Stallwood ALUGlist@digimatic.co.uk wrote:
To be honest that is quite a tough one. Most of the good places tend to be a bit device/platform centric.
Which is fine as far as it goes, but ideally I was looking for somewhere like ALUG where we all use Linux but don't all use the same distro. I get the impression it's something whose time is coming, given the popularity of Pi/Arduino/etc, but unfortunately it'll probably take the form of a forum rather than a mailing list (not that I really found much in the way of forums either, except hanging off the back of some electronics mags but the forums seem very quiet).
On the Pi/BB you have the advantage of doing it all in userland at a very high level if you want, and using pretty much any language.
And the advantage of finding example code and tutorials all over the place!
Arduino you get simplicity and the fun of doing it relatively close to the metal, but you are pretty much stuck with Arduino's Pseudo C++ like language (though if this sort of development tickles your fancy and you want to expand to other projects you can of course move (and even port your existing projects to) a grown-up AVR development environment quite easily)
AVR stuff generally I'd like to get into; I haven't really played with that sort of level of stuff, at least not in the last 20 years and things have changed a bit since then :-)
In fact for your colleagues project there is something on arduino.cc which is already 80% of the way there.
Thanks for that, I'll take a look. I'd been looking more at the Pi and BBB with the Arduino almost an afterthought, maybe I have it the wrong way around!
Personally I wouldn't consider a Pi in any application where I didn't need it's Gfx/hdmi capabilities but that's because outside of those I don't believe it is a very good platform
Historically I've done several jobs on small Linux boxes (previously x86 based, more recently ARM based) and aside from the actual packaging the Pi is better than most of them at a fraction of the cost.
I prefer the BeagleBone Black - it just feels like a better board, has far more capability, is faster, has onboard flash and supports microSD (not SD cards sticking out of the side of the board), and is only marginally more expensive. The majority of the "how-tos" talk about the Pi but where that's a code issue I can work out the differences, it's hardware differences that leave me out of my depth.
To be honest I can turn myself to whatever coding is required, it's more the electronics that I have a problem with. For example, almost any analogue I'm going to want to interface with will be 4-20mA or 0-10V, and I just don't know enough to work out what goes between that and (for example) the 0-1.8V ADC input on the BBB.