Posted on 09/28/2015 8:35:20 PM PDT by dayglored
Sure. We’re a few months out (can’t wait for the movie - better not disappoint) but the project shouldn’t be that hard. I’ve seen some on the net try and keep all the motors and controls in the head - that’s not the way to go. I can do it with the center of gravity in the body and it with be nice and stable.
Good project to get my 9 year old daughter interested in engineering.
Not insisting using Windows 10 and C# would necessarily be optimal, just easier to work with for me and my 9 year old daughter for now.
I love my Pi devices and use RaspBMC (Kodi) on all of them. I have a couple of Pi 2 devices collecting dust. This might be a good test platform.
YES!! Do it! My daughter was brought up with an engineering interest, she's now 22, majoring in CompSci, is working on her private pilot's license, and makes her Daddy proud every day.
I promise you, you and your daughter will benefit tremendously. (But you knew that already...) :-)
I have a BS, MS in CS.
W10 was NOT designed for embedded use.
Linux can be recompiled into a distribution targeting either embedded or desktop or server. In addition, the code for linux has long been processor independent.
Windows fairly recently (a handful of years ago) added ARM support. the initial ports were pretty bad.
We won’t even get into the stuff Windows does in the “background” that you don’t want it to do. Ever watch your hard drive light or monitor your network while your windows computer is supposedly doing nothing? You will find it’s doing “stuff”. In Windows 10, that includes even more spying.
Enjoy yourself swimming in the cesspool of Windows. Also, all the windows jobs are going away, as windows moves to the cloud. It’s a useless skill to learn. If you learn a real OS, you have a profession instead of a skill
Engineering is where it is at. I just opened 7 new reqs, and will likely open 22 new reqs for my department before the end of the year. There’s always jobs for good engineers. (Software engineers, in this case, but we have DB positions and tech ops positions open, too.)
We don't disagree on that. (And BTW my background is here. I was doing embedded systems from the late 1970's through about 2005.)
> Ever watch your hard drive light or monitor your network while your windows computer is supposedly doing nothing? You will find it’s doing “stuff”. In Windows 10, that includes even more spying.
Again, we don't disagree. OTOH, the same is true on my Linux and OS X systems. There's always some amount of system stuff going on; granted that it's mostly the disks and rarely involves the network.
Embedded systems typically are truly quiescent when not doing something substantive. If nothing else it saves energy (my spacecraft ACS CPUs typically slept whenever possible for that reason).
The reason I think it's cool that Win10 is being shoehorned into a RPi is that it will force Windows folks to think small, think efficient, etc. all of which are Good Things. Windows programmers and architects have for decades worked with the assumption that CPUs scream, disks are infinite, memory is infinite, etc. It's about time they had a real challenge, IMO.
So while Win10 might not be a great first choice for an embedded system -at present-, it's an excellent move to learn with. I believe that long-term it will improve Windows, which is a good thing for the world in general.
BTW, I worked for MSoft for awhile. It’s getting worse, not better.
At some point, MSoft will come to an inflection point (and it’s in the next few years).
Their reserves are shrinking, and their cash cow is running dry.
In 10 years, they will be bankrupt if they can’t institute MAJOR change.
I played around with it a bit this evening, using a Raspberry Pi 2. Here are my initial impressions.
-Initial setup was not difficult, basically you download an ISO, mount it, run the installer inside the ISO. This installs a utility that you can use to write the Windows Core image to a MicroSD card,
- Only one wifi adapter is supported, and it is sold out most places. The most commonly used, Edimax, adapter is not supported. You can’t do jack without networking, so unless you have the appropriate wifi adapter, you will need a wired connection.
- It boots into a little UI that shows you the computer name and IP, and lets you do a few minimalist administrative tasks. There may be more there that I have not discovered yet.
- You use PowerShell remoting to remotely log in. It says SSH is also supported - have not tried that yet.
- Looks like you will use Visual Studio on a remote host, along with Remote debugging to write, deploy, debug, and test apps. I think for me, this is the only real attraction, as I am very familiar with these tools, and would love to be able to write apps for it in C#.
- There does not seem to be much available in terms f apps and services. Of course, using Raspbian (Linux) there are a HUGE amount of packages, most of the fairly mature. So this is a major disadvantage to Windows on this platform.
So overall, it looks like a nice start, but I would say it is not really ready for prime time yet. I think a lot that’s nice about the Pi is that you can use it to glue together several things to make a cheap but useful system. For example, I used a Pi, a webcam, a motorized pet feeder, some custom hardware and software to make a little system that I can use to feed my cat and observe that he is ok when I am away from the house. If I tried that with Windows, I would immediately run into the lack of software or hardware support for webcams. So what use is it, really?
I think the big question is will MS stick with it, and how much investment will it get. For now, at least for me, it’s a wait-and-see platform.
Great initial info! Thanks!!
Thanks. Maybe there will be more supported stuff by the time I want to build my BB8. I really was most attracted to the C# coding.
That doesn't make any sense to me. All moving to the cloud does is relocate the endpoint. The days of the "right-click" admin are over, but all the management requirements are still there. The physical constraints of the cloud (potentially high latency and restricted bandwidth of the management channel) dictate that the admins will have to adapt to a new toolset, but the jobs aren't going away unless people just quit developing for and using the OS.
I think the Raspberry Pi kit is more of a "because we can" / POC demo at the moment. It's interesting but not very useful to the Raspberry Pi community as it is. The primary objective of W10 IoT Core is to provide a path forward for existing embedded Windows systems, particularly hundreds of thousands of ATMs that are still running embedded XP.
I think the Raspberry Pi kit is more of a "because we can" / POC demo at the moment. It's interesting but not very useful to the Raspberry Pi community as it is. The primary objective of W10 IoT Core is to provide a path forward for existing embedded Windows systems, particularly hundreds of thousands of ATMs that are still running embedded XP.Ok, that makes sense to me, and puts it in perspective. I think it will be worth keeping an eye on this tech to see how it develops.
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