| Well, I was talking about the Raspberry Pi Zero specifically, which doesn't have those RISC cores. One particularly cool Single-board Computer (SBC) is the Beaglebone Blue. The Beaglebone Blue came with "PRUs" (Programmable Realtime Units), which seem similar to the OpenRISC core you are talking about. Such "embedded microcontrollers" exist because the main computer. There are also a hell of a lot more GPIO pins, ADCs, Servo-channels, Motor-controls, and other such stuff to assist the robotic designers. No need for "Realtime" Linux either, if you're focusing on the PRU / alternative cores to do the heavy-lifting. So I didn't want to discriminate against SBCs as much as I wanted to highlight the importance of low-latency and consistent reads off of pins. Two things that the Raspberry Pi is pretty dismal at doing. --------- In any case, previous discussions with the "Orange Pi" clearly don't "get" it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12890005 Its fine, ycombinator is a web-technology, software-focused message board. YCombinator cares about web-technologies, keeping up with Linux Kernel patches, and the like. And that's good and important. However, embedded and microcontroller features are often ignored, despite embedded topics popping up around here pretty often. So I felt it necessary to bring up the compare/contrast. |
At this point, you need a time machine to get a BB Blue, anyway.