I've talked previously about my project to develop a MIDI appliance.
I hope you all don't mind a few more questions about my decision making.
The big question for me is "what is the cheapest and most flexible
design architecture to use given the processing requirements?"
Requirements:
32 MIDI ports (16 in, 16 out)
20x2 LCD
4x4 keypad
10/100 Ethernet with IP stack.
Enough processor and RAM to allow simultaneous reception and
transmission on all 32 MIDI ports, and send, receive on Ethernet.
Enough non-volatile storage to store user settings and OS/application.
Now I could do all of this with my old 1992 developed Zilog Z80 SBC
computer except for the Ethernet and IP stack. Though even if I had
Ethernet for the Z80 I'd still like to keep up with the modern world!
Still, I have a huge amount of MIDI assembler code ready for the task.
Unfortunately, the TS-7xxx series has all of these extras that I don't
need like USB, 2 Com ports etc. Is there a TS board that just has the
flash, the LCD interface, a keypad interface, the processor, the RAM
and the PC-104 interface?
The web site says $119 for qty 100 or more. Just how much am I going
to pay for the TS-7200 as a single unit?
On a completely different note, I have a huge amount of MIDI
application code written in Turbo C (remember that?). How hard do you
think it is going to be for me to port/rewrite device drivers into
Linux? Should I just accept starting from scratch or are all of those
old DOS interrupt calls and hardware calls still somewhat valid in Linux?
Once again, thanks for your help and any input is very much appreciated.
Mike H.
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