> It's a classic tradeoff regarding RasPi vs Arduino vs FPGA. Everyone has > different pain-points for cost, power, boot-time, features, development > effort, etc.
Quite true. > Maybe Aduino is a better option; I'm going that route for my next clock > project. If you plan your design, you can add various shields for added > features and still run the DMM and nixies (maybe thru I2C ?). My only dislike > regarding Arduino is the I/O is rather slow, and there aren't a lot of pins. The Arduino IDE is extensible, and many companies (including Arduino) have run with this, offering the Arduino development environment for much more powerful chips. I have a personal fondness for the AdaFruit "feather" series and the PJRC "Teensy" ones, both of which offer some very nice hardware (32-bit ARM CPUs at good clock rates and lots of I/O) at very attractive prices and you can plug them right into a breadboard if you like. I've ended up building these into a wide variety of projects. > An FPGA will give you the fastest boot-time (milliseconds), tons of I/Os, and > probably lowest power-consumption (below 400mW for me), The lowest power consumption solution I've personally worked with is TI's MSP430 line. Those chips (especially the FRAM ones) are amazingly power efficient and reasonably powerful as well. > but it involves the most work (you better be a good Verilog or VHDL coder). > I've done 3 different clock designs with FPGA's, and it was a bit more work > developing the code. However, it's far, FAR better than hardwired logic such > as what I did on my first nixie clock. I haven't gotten much into FPGAs myself (I worked with the earlier PAL and GAL technology some). Note that the environments are only available for Linux and windows. > A RasPi will have everything you want, plus more. But it's going to cost a > bit more and use more power. However, it makes code updates very simple > (connect to internet & download), not to mention you can do bizarre things > like logging into your device even if it's at a customer site far, far away. A Pi Zero is $5, so it's cheaper that almost everything else out there. However, I only use something like that when I can deal with the "real OS" issues (boot time, varying I/O timing, etc.). I have no patience for clocks, so I'm always looking for other nixie projects to build. - John -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to neonixie-l@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/D58F5444-ED8C-4E0B-8F63-C97A7CAE99A0%40mac.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
