On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 4:47 AM, Blair <com>
wrote:
> Interesting...what kind of boot times are you seeing on the
Phidgets SBC? This
> was one of the primary reasons I went with TS products. Another
reason was
> onboard ADCs. Both of these turned out to be far less than
"insanely great".
> Fast boot on a 7260 is half-baked IMHO because you can't "fast
shutdown" due
> to the use of EXT2. And the onboard ADCs are too slow.
I guess I didn't make a purchasing decision on either feature. Boot
time into the minimal shell is fast, but it isn't running any
services. I boot into Debian for the full distro which takes an age.
But since the board is never meant to go down while in operation boot
time is not much of a concern for me.
As for the ADCs, two of them are not of much use to me. I developed my
system based on Phidget Interfaces, which means I can run them on a
PC, and then when I'm ready run them on a SBC like the TS-7260. The
Phidget Controller has 8 ADC's, and some excellent libraries for
various languages.
In terms of hardware I'm happy with the TS-7260, but I do have some
serious concerns about the software. When I bought the TS-7260 I
thought I would get an experience similar to Phidgets, where all you
need is ready to roll.
Instead I get an obsolete version of Debian that does not have the
sources list correctly updated with no libraries to use the features
on the board. Perhaps this is aimed at professional engineers, but
even they - I presume - want to focus on just getting the job done
rather than fighting just to get a current distro working correctly or
writing their own interface software.
Now, I'm a little curious that there does not appear to be a
development community around TS products. When I was working with
OpenMoko there was a strong community developing all kinds of things.
I've been thinking that we could build our own Debian images and
include some libraries to control the onboard hardware from various
languages.
It really would be good to have a image which just worked - aka have
everything loaded to make Wifi and USB work, while having a modern
distro. I really don't understand why they continue to ship 2.4. They
could easily provide the older image as well if people need it.
I don't want this to be a rant against Technologic - the seem to make
nice products - perhaps we can just help them get things into better
shape in the software department for people who don't have time to be
messing around just getting stuff to work.