> From: Chris Albertson [mailto:[email protected]]
>
> I don't call it a problem. With the three board designs, you can make a
> replacement for one of the "wings". splitting it up makes the design of
> each really easy. And as said PCBs this size cost under $1 each even in
> tiny quantity. So what I see you have here is the start of a family of
> boards.
>
> My problem with this is that I think the Beagle board is grossly
> underpowered. It is OK if you are making a battery-powered, portable
> milling machine but if you have access to AC mains power why use a beagle?
>
Chris, I think you just made my case for me. It's not so much that the Beagle
is underpowered with the two co-processors. It's that the OS and system has
exploded in size and inefficiency because the developers are always running the
latest and greatest development systems. Way back a Pentium-33 had no trouble
running EMACs and a Pentium-33 was way slower than a BBB.
And we've allowed this inefficiency to happen without complaint. I have a
Panasonic Blu-ray player. Always bugged me that it took so long after the
power switch was pressed before it responded to the button to open the drawer.
It had no trouble immediately scrolling a message on the display telling me it
was powering up. Turns out it's running Linux. So a 20 second start up time
is considered permissible even though it's rude to the user.
The BBB with Replicape and OctoPrint can sit in the connecting state for quite
some time while it explores all the serial ports at two different baud rates
before it finds the BBB. Or, you can select which serial port you want to use
and it's connected right away.
How much of MachineKit on a BBB is spent searching for and doing general stuff
that really isn't needed for an embedded system. How much of the software is
written with the idea that there is 4GB to 8GB of 64 bit wide memory on a
system that has 512MB of RAM. That the end user wants to watch movies and surf
the web.
I used to make fun of IBM PCs with their 8 bit external bus 8088, 640K RAM and
hard drive DOS systems. Running DBASE-II took 5 seconds to get to the DBASE-II
prompt. My 8 bit Z-80 system with 56K bytes RAM and 8" floppy disks did it in
under 2 seconds.
Yes. Apples and Oranges. Needless to say the PC was more powerful. But my
point is that if the MachineKit port was designed for 64 bit PCs with even just
1GB RAM and fast hard drives the likelihood of it being efficient without a
total rewrite on a smaller 32 bit processor with 512MB won't happen.
So I'll throw up the question. Is as you said, "the Beagle board is grossly
underpowered", or has LinuxCNC/MachineKit suffered now the same Code Bloat that
Microsoft Windows and Apple have, making the need for bigger processors with
more memory mandatory?
John
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