On Sat, 26 May 2012, Roy Smith wrote: > What's the smallest/cheapest/lowest-power hardware platform I can run > Python on today? I'm looking for something to use as a hardware > controller in a battery-powered device and want to avoid writing in C > for this project. > > Performance requirements are minimal. I need to monitor a few switches, > control a couple of LEDs and relays, and keep time over about a 30 > minute period to 1/10th second accuracy. Nice-to-have (but not > essential) would be a speech synthesizer with a vocabulary of maybe 50 > words. > > The Rasberry Pi certainly looks attractive, but isn't quite available > today. Can you run Python on an Arduino? Things like > http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/board-detail.php?product=TS-7250 are > more than I need, and the $129 price probably busts my budget.
If you are on tight budget and depend so much on Python, I'm afraid you should either: a. grow your budget b. try another language For what I know, I wouldn't touch Arduino unless I really had to. The reason for this, I have been spoiled by machines, of which the smallest I wanted to touch had 3mb of ram. Arduinos, with their ram in kilobytes at best, don't qualify as interesting from my point of view. Also, I don't think they are so much attractive price-wise. I would rather buy myself a Beagle Bone, like this one: http://www.adafruit.com/products/513 http://beagleboard.org/bone However, if all that you want is flip some leds, this is huge overkill. For led flipping, Arduino sounds ok, just not with Python-as-we-like-it. Maybe some pseudoPython can be had on it. Myself, I would rather go with one of Arduino's supported languages or assembly. Or Forth. If you land among embedded systems, it's better to speak embeddish or you will feel uncomfortable. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com ** -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
