[NTLK] NewtonTalk Digest, Vol 48, Issue 8

[Alex Perez]

On 2013-September-08, at 7:32 AM, Matthias Melcher <mm at matthiasm.com> 
wrote:
>>> Hi Newton fans,
>>>
>>> In my everlasting quest to solve the 2-million-squares Sudoku that is the Newton ROM, I played a bit with hardware as well. I removed the ROM board from a dead MP2000 and the ROM slot from an eMate - also dead - and made a board that fits onto an Arduino. I can now read any ROM or Flash board out there without the need of a working MessagePad.
>> It's time like this that I wish that the Arduino had an ARM processor or the Raspberry Pi had a bit more of a bus.
>>
>> I wonder about the Arduino Due, are the address and data busses adequately exposed to allow code execution?
>
> Yeah, the Pi is quite low on pins. Also, thanks to the complex OS, timing is not that easy. Controlling stepper motors from the Pi is a pain thanks to unpredictable timing.

Actually, there's a port of FreeRTOS to Raspberry Pi - 
http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=22423
>
> I don't think that the address and data bus are available at the CPU at all. It's more a system-on-a-chip with 96k of RAM and 512k of flash.
>
> http://arduino.cc/de/uploads/Main/arduino-Due-schematic.pdf
>
> Depending on the job, it might make sense to have an Arduino do the grunt work (control the steppers and ink cartridge in a printer, for example) and have a Pi manage the ethernet acces and higher level stuff. Then connect them via SPI.
>
>   - Matthias
>