There flight tests proved the current system inefficient for all of the planned computation and communication with the groundserver. They claimed to be using a 416 Mhz xscale, which seems fairly beefy to me, and I was under the impression that ramming floating point instructions through a fixed-point register was grossly inefficient.
However, I am very new to embedded systems, and your question makes me think that the control algorithm itself is the culprit. On 7/14/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky < [EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Andre wrote: > Check out the open source paparazzi project. > http://www.recherche.enac.fr/paparazzi/wiki/index.php/Main_Page > > and gumstix boards. > > _____ > > From: Jack Poulson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Thursday, July 12, 2007 11:17 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: [gentoo-embedded] ARMs w/ Floating Point > > > I apologize for the off-topic question, but I would like to become involved > in the group and need to order an ARM board which actually contains a > floating point register first. It will serve as the flight control system on > a > Unmanned Aerial Vehicle project for my college. Their previous attempt > proved too slow, and I would like to set up a new system running a stripped > down version of Gentoo. > > Does anyone have any suggestions for a chipset? Any responses are greatly > appreciated. > > Jack Poulson > > > > Just out of curiosity, why do you think floating point arithmetic is necessary for a flight control application? People have been doing fixed-point flight control and other real-time applications for at least fifty years, and the hardware requirements for fixed-point arithmetic are *always* going to be less than for floating point arithmetic. Now floating point hardware may be inexpensive enough now that it's *feasible* to use it for this application, but I really don't think it's *necessary*. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
