[Today’s run: 3 miles]
A while ago I picked up this cheap Arm-SoC board from a company called OkDo. The board has a dual core NXP device on it.
There is amazingly little on the internet about it. I found some introductory videos and fooled around with it a little bit.
I was just thinking about it again the other day. It would be interesting to see if I could get FreeRTOS running on it. The NXP development IDE seems to have a FreeRTOS example. Maybe I should give that a try.
One of the things I like about my current job is programming closer to the hardware. Computers are just instruction execution devices. They start at the top and follow the instructions. Something like a microcontroller doesn’t have an operating system, it pretty much has one thread of operation. As the chip gets more powerful then you get into time slicing and multi-tasking and layers of virtualization with various forms of security to keep any malicious task from bringing down the system or peeking into the neighbor tasks’ data.
Anyway this E1 board has what it takes to run FreeRTOS. Maybe it would even run some form of embedded Linux, I don’t know. I’m surprised that there isn’t more info along those lines. It is that kind of question that captures my interest: what chip features are necessary to run embedded linux. I should google that.