Re: mizar32 Lua board on sale

[Tony <luatony@...>]

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 12:57 PM, Jay Carlson <nop@nop.com> wrote:
> On May 2, 2012, at 8:36 AM, sergei karhof wrote:
>
>>>>  The Mizar32 board, the first commercial computer to come with Lua
>>>> (eLua) as its operating system, is now on sale at 4star.it
>>
>>>> Specs: 66Mhz AVR32 CPU, 32MB RAM, I2C, SPI, PWM, ADC, SD-card, USB
>>>> with UART, Ethernet, character LCD and VGA add-on modules.
>>>>
>>>> Web: http://simplemachines.it/mizar32
>>>> Shop: http://4star.it -> mizar32
>>
>> Cool. A good start.
>>
>> BTW what about that project to make Lua work on Raspberry Pi?
>
> It would be shocking if it didn't work out of the box; the RPi is just another $45 Linux box--although with Newark wildly guessing "141 days lead time" on stock, you may find the slightly cheaper Pogoplug more interesting if less featureful.
>
> If you mean "run Lua on bare metal RPi", you'll be limited to the released peripheral documentation, and whatever can be deduced about the hardware from the Linux source code, bootloader, and binary blobs. Broadcom does not require you to order 10k chips to get hardware documentation, but by reports they at least want to see a plausible business plan before reaching the NDA stage.
>
> This isn't that unusual; I don't have a datasheet on the (say) RTL8196C either. At least the RPi is explicitly marketed to be tinkered with, unlike hobbyists reverse-engineering other hardware. Platform stability is nice too; consumer hardware often gets radical architecture changes between different hardware revs.
>
> My hardware-of-the-month is a Atheros AR71xx 802.11n router; it's $17-21 refurb or $32 new. That includes tax but not the cost of traveling to the store and back. It's fully supported in OpenWrt stable, which of course uses Lua to implement the web configuration interface.
>
> Jay
>
>
Actually,  Broadcom's policy is unusual overall; only a few chip
makers such as Broadcom and Marvell want NDAs before letting you see
their datasheets.

TI is supporting a bare metal approach on selected ARM and DSP chips
with their StarterWare libraries, including the Cortex A8 AM335x, so
apparently there are enough people that feel that sometimes no OS is
the best OS.

A critical difference between embedded boards such as the Mizar32 &
the BeagleBone and the RPi & routers are peripherals such as ADCs,
PWMs, and quadrature encoders.

--Tony