Thread: Motor Drivers
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Unread 19-02-2013, 13:59
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Re: Motor Drivers

The propeller has basically no peripherals. While that gives you a lot of flexibility in code, there are some things that should stay peripherals.

I work professionally with a MPC5600 series processor, which has a lot of peripherals. The eTPU (Time Processing Unit), eMIOS (Modular Input Output System), and DMA (Direct Memory Access) alone on the chip I am currently working with would take around 192 propeller cogs to get something close in functionality, and the TPUs also additional peripherals to synthesize clocks (e.g. angle clock/angle timestamp) and manage timestamps/clocks that would have to be replicated somehow. This dosen't include SPI, QADC or the actual PowerPC itself. While you could likely move some of the algorithms into the cogs that deal with the IO, you would basically need over 200 cogs to get the low and some mid-level software done, and we haven't even touched comm, OS, or high-level application code.

A good C compiler is basically a requirement for an embedded platform these days, especially with autocoding tools which generate C code from models.
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