Meeting 20100422
Makerspace Agenda/Meeting
- Makerspace intro (5 min)
- anyone new, please introduce yourself!
- Makerspace business (15 min)
- Earth day recap
- hand out flyers to those @ the meeting - please pass them out or put them up!
- budget: no change since last week
- current funds: $4000 of $6000
- current members: 17 (+2)
- dues: sign up on the website for recurring donations
- What You Can Do:
- call the owners of buildings you see to find out the monthly rate, lease terms, and square footage!
- post flyers
- tell your friends and coworkers
- drop a note on any relevant mailing lists, forums, or news groups you're on
- past events
- Earth Day
- National Robotics Week
- I think at this point the fashion will have happened, so we can talk about that too.
- upcoming events
- Hackerspaces Call-in - Sunday, May 2, 2010, 3pm-4pm (CDT).
- Richardson Wildflower Festival - Friday, May 14, 2010, through Sunday, May 16, 2010.
- DFW Dragon Boat Festival May 16. No booth or table available; we will be performing some aerial photography and possibly distributing some fliers
- Next Meeting: Half Price Books on Northwest Hwy (still waiting on clearance from HPB, Ed coordinating ) Company|Dallas again probably
Minutes
Presentation
Microcontrollers and More: A Survey of Boards
Ed and Steve will provide a quick survey of available boards that you can use to develop embedded software for. We'll talk about the pros and cons of several of the boards including:
- cost - how much are you willing to spend?
- $10 - kits, super barebone microcontrollers
- under $50 - microcontrollers
- under $100 - small arm systems
- under $200 - things with decent networking capabilities
- more than $200 - computers
- size
- "stamp" sized
- "name badge" sized
- "cigar box" sized
- power requirements
- USB powered - 2.5 watts
- netbook - about 10 watts
- CPU "horsepower"
- 8 bit or 32 bit
- microcontroller or minicomputer
- expandability and/or IO capabilities
- direct digital IO
- commodity interfaces: RS232/RS485 serial, USB
- card slots: PC/104, PCI/104, PCI
- how easy is it to download programs?
- commodity stuff - plug in your thumbdrive
- serial boot loaders
- JTAG adapters
- how easy is it to set up a tool chain?
- out of the box, provided by vendor
- online (!)
- the hard way: DIY the whole thing
- what is the cost of any development tools required?
- JTAG adapters
- proprietary compilers
- proprietary libraries (usually licenses for libraries for some linux boards)
- free/none required
- Specific boards to pass around
- Qwerk
- hardware details
- embedded linux system with ethernet, wifi, motor controllers and other IO
- no longer for sale
- BeagleBoard
- hardware details
- embedded linux system with DVI video and USB
- available for $150
- Pololu Orangutan
- family comparison
- "larger" of the Atmel Atmega system with LCD and motor controllers
- $60 - $150 for the better ones, depending on what accessories and pre-assembly
- Diamond 486 PC/104
- older PC/104 computer
- PC/104 description - a form factor for ISA bus computers
- no longer for sale
- PCI/104 - a similar idea for PCI systems
- VEX PIC-based controller
- Microchip PIC
- $150 for a new one
- standard Arduino
- a minimalistic Atmel development board with on board bootloader and robust programming libraries and support
- many choices for variety of prices $10 (kits mostly) to the $65 Arduino Mega
- NXP mbed
- ARM cpu with support chip for USB Thumb Drive-style programming
- optional online compiler and IDE
- $60 from Mouser.com
- LPC1768-based
- LPC2368-based
- miniITX and nanoITX
- x86-based small form factor commodity motherboards
- usually not much direct IO
- USB, serial ports, VGA, sometimes a PCI card slot
- store with a selection of miniITX boards
- store with a selection of picoITX boards
- a host of small embedded wierdo systems that are probably good for a one-off project
- shiva(?) plug
- gumstix
- linksys NSLU
- a host of repurposed wireless routers
- forget all of them except the WRT54GL
- goes for about $70
- Qwerk
break out for discussions (no limit)
Attendees
| Name | Relation | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gordon Burditt | Embedded Workshop | |||
| Ted Cackowski | DMS | |||
| Jason Grant | New (DMS) | |||
| Ralph Green | ||||
| Mark Havens | DPRG/DMS | |||
| Jon Hunt | Embedded Workshop | |||
| Jay Jentig | Embedded Workshop | |||
| Ian Lim | DMS | |||
| Brian Merritt | DPRG | |||
| Mike Metzger | DMS | |||
| Ed Paradis | DMS | Richard Philley | Embedded Workshop | |
| Glenn Pipe | DPRG | |||
| Peter Smith | DPRG/DMS | |||
| Johnny Stovall | Dallas Android Users Group |
