Stephen Wille Padnos wrote: > > Considering that a D945GCLF2 motherboard is $80, 2GB memory is $40, a > hard drive is $50, and a DC-DC power supply is $50 (you could of course > get a full ATX case with power supply for less), I'm not sure where the > beagleboard really helps. It's definitely smaller. It's somewhat less > expensive (though I'm not sure how far below $220 you're going to get, > once you add a power supply, I/O conditioning, etc), it takes somewhat > less power (3W vs. 26W). > > For the small differences in cost, size, and power, you end up with a > full PC with gigabit network, 1.6GHz dual-core CPU, reasonable 3D > graphics, excellent latency numbers (maybe 8000 or so IIRC), and a PCI slot. > > Of course there's always a bit of pride to be taken in doing more with > less, I'm not sure there's really a great payoff here. > Does this have a parallel port that does EPP? The Beagle is actually quit "cute". You can run it quite well off an 8 GB SD card, no hard drive at all, and a USB-Ethernet dongle. So, that is about $208. I just found out how to use one of the $9.95 Chinese USB-net dongles, so that drops the price down to $175 plus some shipping. It runs off a single 5 V supply, a wall-wart is fine at these power levels. It would also run quite well from 12 V with a little regulator chip. You'd need some surge protection from the spiky car electrical system, though. I have a board that converts the Beagle's expansion port to 5 V levels and EPP parallel port pinout. (That will runs any standard parallel port function as well.)
This whole "new direction" was started as insurance against loss of the old parallel port and possibly destruction of real time latency with newer incarnations of the Intel core 9000 hyper-megaplex CPUs in the pipeline. It would also allow people who INSIST on using old laptops to get their way. They could run the GUI on the laptop, and link to the beagle via Ethernet. The Beagle would be inside the CNC control box. Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Return on Information: Google Enterprise Search pays you back Get the facts. http://p.sf.net/sfu/google-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
