[NTLK] NewtonTalk Digest, Vol 48, Issue 8

[Andrei Chichak]

On 2013-September-09, at 11:07 AM, Alex Perez <aperez at alexperez.com> wrote:

> 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


Time to kill this. The RTOS on the Pi isn't the problem, someone is finishing up a port of RTEMS for the Pi, but that doesn't get around the issue that the Pi doesn't have enough I/O pins to access the ROM image without doing something dumb like using a parallel to SPI  conversion processor.

Matthias is right, what he's done is cool, but that's about the extent of its usefulness.

A