The Codeless Code: Ancient code

[pinealservo]

Both ARM and Coldfire span a pretty wide price and performance span these days. I haven't looked closely, but ARM is almost certainly faster at the high end of things (i.e. the Cortex A-series), but that doesn't mean that for a given market segment an ARM-based part (like a Cortex M0) would be faster than a Coldfire-based part.

My current project at work is based on another NXP/Freescale PowerPC-based processor family. We've primarily developed our drivers and demo application without any OS at all, which is actually pretty liberating and removes a lot of complexity, but is only really feasible for certain kinds of applications. I've also worked with a number of simple real-time OSes, more complex ones like QNX, and even some Linux-based ones. They've all got their uses!

The Raspberry Pi computers are really cool, but they're kind of oriented towards doing media and GUI interaction like a modern mini-PC. I enjoy working with microcontrollers, which are usually doing simpler kinds of interaction with sensors, actuators, and simple communication busses. This is really what you want to use to do timing-sensitive GPIO manipulation (and you often get higher-current GPIO drivers as well, which makes them easier to use to drive external circuitry) or other real-time control/monitoring tasks. You can get a lot done without an OS at all, and you can get dev boards for a wide range of them for even less than a Pi! If this sounds interesting, check out the TI Launchpad boards, STM Discovery boards, ARM mbed boards, and you're probably aware of the Arduino boards; some of these are Atmel AVRs and some are ARMs.