Embedded board with good support out of the box?

[Chris Johns]

On 22/05/2015 9:39 am, Steve B wrote:
> 
> 
> On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 3:34 PM, Chris Johns <chrisj at rtems.org
> <mailto:chrisj at rtems.org>> wrote:
> 
> 
>     What drivers do you need that are missing from these boards ?
> 
>     The Zynq has a polled console driver, timer support, I2C, and ethernet
>     (using libbsd). MMC maybe covered by libbsd, I have not looked. QSPI is
>     not difficult and GPIO is easy.
> 
>     Chris
> 
> 
> I need CAN bus, a couple of UARTs (one of which may need interrupts),
> some sort of ADC (whether it is the built in one or external), file
> logging, and some GPIO. No need for Ethernet unless it really proves
> useful in uploading software remotely or spitting out diagnostic data
> faster than a UART can handle.
>

The Zynq has a CAN controller however I have not used it. The other bits
and pieces should be ok. The Zynq has the XADC hardware and I have used
them but only for the various internal voltages and temperatures. For
specific applications I have used external 16bit ADCs (up to 250MHz
sample rates) that interface to the PL logic directly.

> BBB seems to only have polled console and I2C in the bsp currently.
> 
> With Zynq I suspect that I may be able to add Open Cores CAN IP core to
> the programmable logic and borrow the existing drivers from the Leon3
> BSP for minimal effort, unless that's discouraged for any reason. The
> downside on my end is that anything in the programmable logic is just
> one more thing that I'd have to keep track of. Otherwise I have some
> recent experience porting BBB CAN bus to work with Xenomai, so I could
> probably figure out the driver on my own if it came down to that.
> But my biggest hesitation with Zynq is figuring out the toolchain and
> development flow. Seems like a little bit of a hassle.
> 
> Looking through the libbsp source, it seems like only leon3 and one of
> the PPC bsps have CAN drivers already in there but neither of those
> probably have enough horsepower.

There are CAN bus people using RTEMS I hope can provide better advice
than me.

Chris