Re:CHIP Pro
by jhallenworld on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @06:06PM
(#12696795)
Yes, small boards are great as GPIOs for PCs.
Another way is to use the FTDI chip directly: http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/FT2232_breakout_board You can twiddle bits (including SPI and I2C) using their D2XX library.
But you are better off to get one of these: http://www.latticesemi.com/en/Products/DevelopmentBoardsAndK...
You get the FTDI chip plus an FPGA thrown in for free.
But you are better off to get one of these: http://www.latticesemi.com/en/Products/DevelopmentBoardsAndK....
That looks like fun. I haven't played with a FPGA yet. My preference for using a microcontroller, as opposed to bit banging the FTDI, is that the MCU runs in real time and has peripherals such as SPI, timers, etc. Right now my favorite board du jour is the Teensy 3.2, though I just got a 3.6 to try out.
Disclosure: This stuff happens to be my hobby and profession, and I have extensive experience with embedded systems and microprocessor based electronics design.
The smaller boards have been infinitely useful to me. I do a lot of development, using Teensy boards to create peripherals that I can connect via USB to either a PC or a RPi. These peripherals control things like sensors, motors, etc. The microcontroller code serves as a sort of hardware abstraction layer, letting me test and talk to my gadgets via a terminal program.
Admittedly, the RPi's have been less useful. Because my gadgets talk via USB, it's easy to configure my systems so that I can do my higher level software development on either a PC or a RPi. The same software, in Python, runs on both systems with no code changes. So I tend to use the more "comfortable" system for development, and that's the Windows system with its big screen and quick response.
Bill Gates claims to have predicted that more people would be interested in developing software than hardware, and when the software runs on any platform, it gets harder for the lower performance hardware to justify its existence. Most of my projects are finished to my satisfaction without ever completing the final step of transferring them to a RPi to run autonomously.
Maybe the problem is that cross platform portability ultimately makes platforms less important.