Re: Embedded Dev System suggestions/reccomendations please

"dathome" <dave@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:W3nni.42$Yu4.38@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"Tom Lucas" <news@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote
in message news:1184757656.72629.0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"dathome" <dave@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Hi Group,

I've worked in the past quite a lot with uC's such as PIC & C164 but
now I have an application where I want to include a small PDA like
touch screen display, USB connection, some basic I/O, some internal
flash memory, maybe up to 1Gig so nothing too unusual I don't think.
Possible extra maybe a webcam for related but different application,
reason for webcam type of camera is that they are dirt cheap.

I also need the necessary development tools and I'm not sure that
writing all code from scratch to support all these things is going
to be the easiest/quickest route so I assume something built on an
embedded linux or CE or similar platform is the way to go.

I've looked through the groups postings and there were a couple of
suggestions like building on a pre-existing PDA or even a phone
based system, I really prefer to build the hardware up from a base
system as I would ultimately like to take this forward as a product
so it probably wouldn't be very cost effective built on an existing
PDA.

Finally as this is a self financed project the tools need to be
cheap, or best of all free. There seem to be a lot of linux info.
about but I've found it difficult to get to the bottom of what I
really require and whether it is obtainable free or not. I don't
mind spending a few £hundred on hardware but with past experience
tools have tended to be in the £k's if you need a good IDE such as
Keil/Tasking/IAR etc.

Any comments would be most appreciated.

I would say that you'd have to be planning to ship a lot of units
before it becomes more cost effective to design your own system
rather than building on an existing PDA. The amount of development
time (and time is money) saved will be huge.

For a development IDE then Rowley's CrossStudio is cost effective and
their support is first class. It will run on Linux too, if that is
your thing.


Hi Tom,

Potentially the quantities are in the 100's/yr but you're right it may
still not be cost effective with time etc. I think until I have
enough information on potential ways forward I can't complete a rough
cost analysis to determine the best way. It may be best to start with
a PDA and then if the concept is sound, find the real sales quantities
and then determine the production solution which may be a completely
custom system to my own design but built from the concept. These are
all normal product development questions though.

Well it's not just the devlopment time either. If you can find a price
for a QVGA LCD, touch screen, backlight inverter, decent lump of RAM,
gig of flash and a processor to run it for less than you can buy a PDA
in 100off quantities then you'd be doing very well. And that doesn't
even include the battery.

Thanks for the CrossStudio link. I don't know yet if Linux is my
thing as I've never used it, but it does seem popular and well
supported these days.

It's not purely Linux and runs on Windows just fine.


.

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