Quote:
Originally Posted by Qbranch
I saw windows embedded at the Freescale Technology Forum 2007 this summer. It was pretty cool, but they had it running on i.MX processors... pretty fast. I think it might run on some of Microchip's big dsPIC24 processors but i'm not sure.
However, the cool thing about Windows XPe/CE is that they run the .NET MicroFramework .... which can run code from Microsoft Robotics Studio. For those of you who havent played with Robotics Studio it has a pretty neat system where you can target your code to an on-computer physical simulation of your robot then turn right around and target it to your MicroFramework compatible controller. It includes drivers for heavy hardware (like Sick scanners n such)....
Really after writing this i think this is way too overkill for doing FIRST robotics. The controller's cost would get way out of hand to have enough hardware to run XPe... plus I think the simplicity and close proximity to the hardware that MCC provieds is a great experience for FIRST programmers.
-q
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I'll agree that running embedded windows would probably take too much hardware, but uClinux or some such would be pretty easy and not too expensive. I'm working with a $99 plug-in Freescale module with a 10/100 LAN interface built in for a research project. It's running uClinux with a webserver and some other things, along with some hardware interrupts, timer interrupts, and SPI code, most of which I'm coding straight to the peripherals. An RTOS doesn't force you to abstract away from the hardware, it just gives you the option to do so to make your code cleaner and more maintainable.