Re: Blue Chip Technology + MagnumX?

David Hearn <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Has anyone got any experience of Blue Chip Technology
(http://www.bluechiptechnology.co.uk/) and especially their MagnumX
single board computers?
(http://www.bluechiptechnology.co.uk/single_board_computer.php?sub_group_id=2)

We've been investigating the ColdFire MCF5475EVB for some quite simple
5 channel GPIO capture - but at quite high data rates. We've got the
266MHz ColdFire processor to do what we want but it just isn't quite
fast enough - it's missing some of the state transitions on the
channels. We're sampling at around 2 to 2.2MHz and we need more like
3.3MHz.

We were wondering whether a faster (2x?) processor would be more
likely to do the job. The 733MHz MagnumX board sounds like it might
do this, and it has 16 channels of GPIO (we only need 5 inputs at
present, unlikely to increase significantly). I'm aware it's moving
from the ColdFire/M68K processor to an x86 processor, but unless
there's a major difference in per cycle processing, that's not a
problem.

Our app is quite simple - loop until a counter expires, each iteration
store 1 byte pin state register and 32 bit counter value. We
currently can sample up to 60MB of data.

Can you not use DMA instead? And/Or perhaps an external FIFO.

So - any experience of the MagnumX would be good - especially with
respect to the need for an OS (currently no OS, so no overhead on the
ColdFire - just simple ELF application). DOS would not be suitable as
we'd need to (easily) be able to access 60MB+ of RAM.

It sounds like this application depends more on the GPIO rate rather
than the CPU core clock speed.

--

John Devereux
.

Relevant Pages

  • Blue Chip Technology + MagnumX?
    ... Has anyone got any experience of Blue Chip Technology and especially their MagnumX single board computers? ... We've got the 266MHz ColdFire processor to do what we want but it just isn't quite fast enough - it's missing some of the state transitions on the channels. ... The 733MHz MagnumX board sounds like it might do this, and it has 16 channels of GPIO. ...
    (comp.arch.embedded)
  • [PATCH] m68knommu: update MAX_M68K_DMA_CHANNELS for some plattforms
    ... Set number of channels of DMA on ColdFire for different implementations. ...
    (Linux-Kernel)