RE: [Paparazzi-devel] New µC Tar get with FPU?

[mark.griffin]

I noticed that there is an open-source hardware board called the "ArduPilot 
Mega" (http://www.diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/ardupilot-mega-home-page) that 
has many features that may make it a good alternative hardware platform for 
Paparazzi. 

It has many inputs/outputs, 4 serial ports, separate PPM encoder, failsafe 
option etc. There is also a daughterboard offering IMU etc. It's being 
mass-produced cheaply by Sparkfun for $60 and could perhaps offer a better 
alternative to the TWOG.

In order to integrate it in the Paparazzi environment, the Paparazzi source 
code would have to be modified to support it. No easy task but certainly doable.

Any views out there of any shortcomings to this approach? Anyone attempted it 
yet? 




-----Original Message-----
From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden On Behalf Of antoine drouin
Sent: Sunday, 2 May 2010 11:30 PM
To: address@hidden
Subject: Re: [Paparazzi-devel] New µC Target with FPU?

By the way, could we get a head up on tinyV3 development ?

On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 11:25 PM, Pat Hickey <address@hidden> wrote:
> If you're interested in more computing power and more interfaces,
> adding a single board computer (Gumstix, Beagleboard etc) to
> supplement the Paparazzi system is widely practiced. I ported
> Paparazzi airborne code to run on a Linux SBC -
> http://moreproductive.org/autopilot/ so that I could add USB camera
> interfaces, wifi, and so on. Working on top of Linux with widely
> available libraries, programming languages, etc. makes it easier to
> write the kind of powerful applications you'd want an FPU for anyway,
> right?
>
> On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 5:07 PM, antoine drouin <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Hello world
>>
>> My 2 cents...
>> I believe Lisa/L in its current form is more "powerful" than the
>> architecture you describe. The 72Mhz Cortex M3 ( STM32F103RE6) is
>> ideally suited to handle fast IOs, can run FreeRTOS and features 64k
>> of RAM and 512k of flash. ST just released an improved version with
>> 96k of RAM and 1M flash ( STM32F103RG ) which is pin compatible and
>> that I intend to use as soon as I can source it.
>> For the heavy computations and ease of programming, the OMAP3530
>> contained in the Gumstix Overo runs at 600MHz, feature 256M of RAM and
>> 256M of FLASH and runs Linux. This natively has a TCP/IP stack as well
>> as drivers for a vast panel of peripherals ( Wifi adapters, Webcam,
>> etc...)
>> I have kept the STM32 on this design because I find it easier and more
>> efficient to program low level IOs on an OS-less microcontroller than
>> on Linux. The communications between the STM and the Overo are done
>> through SPI, served by DMA on both sides. At the moment the Linux side
>> uses the generic "spidev" driver but I plan on having a dedicated
>> kernel driver to handle them in an even more efficient way.
>> mmmm, and I did not mention the C64 DSP core that is also found in the
>> Overo chip, in case you need to crunch numbers even faster than what
>> the Cortex-A8 can do.
>>
>> Best Regards
>>
>> Poine
>>
>>
>> On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 4:45 PM, Francois ALIBERT <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> Hello everybody.
>>>
>>>     I recently saw new hardwares Tiny V3, and LISA, based on ARM
>>> architectures. I worked few time ago with Renesas SH2A based
>>> microcontrollers. A variant of this superscalar core includes a
>>> single/double precision foating point unit (FPU). Renesas made available a
>>> new µC (the SH7216), that integrates many interesting things: it can run up
>>> to 200 MHz, and has: 1MByte of Flash, 128 kByte of RAM, SPI, SCI, Motor
>>> control drivers (input/output PWM). USB and Ethernet driver. There are
>>> software tools (reel time kernels, TCP-IP stacks) that are disponible for
>>> free (FreeRTOS, uIP) for using or for evaluation (µC/OS-III, µC/TCP-IP).
>>>
>>> I used a predecessor of this target, they are very powerful and, do not have
>>> many bugs...
>>>
>>> What about making a very powerful autopilot board based on this? Paparazzi
>>> project will introduce more and more capabilities, some on them are from now
>>> on (EKF for AHRS) CPU time hungry. Introduction of a controller integrating
>>> a FPU will have to be considered soon or late. And of fact of using full
>>> RTOS and TCP-IP software (free software and large memories size) could
>>> introduce new capabilities...
>>>
>>> Renesas SH7216:
>>>
>>> http://www.renesas.eu/products/mpumcu/superh/sh7216/sh7216/sh7216_root.jsp
>>>
>>> FreeRTOS:
>>>
>>> http://www.freertos.org/
>>>
>>> FreeRTOS for SH7216
>>>
>>> → click on Supported Devices ->Renesas (SuperH, H8S) ->SuperH (SH-2A FPU)
>>> SH7216 using the Renesas compiler and HEW
>>>
>>> TCP-IP (Application Notes and Sample Code)
>>>
>>> http://www.renesas.eu/products/mpumcu/superh/sh7216/sh7216/Application_Notes.jsp
>>>
>>> Surch on the page for: TCP-IP
>>>
>>> Micrium :
>>>
>>> http://micrium.com/page/home
>>>
>>> µC/OS-III for SH7216 and SH7216 evaluation board:
>>>
>>> http://bookstore.micrium.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=20
>>>
>>> Regards
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Paparazzi-devel mailing list
>>> address@hidden
>>> http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/paparazzi-devel
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
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