Re:Arduino TRE
by zecken on Saturday April 04, 2015 @04:15AM
(#9320342)
Probably UART, the same way the FTDI chip in new UNOs talks to the AVR. In any case, the reason having an ARM cpu w/ an AVR is beneficial is because you get the linux environment but real-time hardware GPIO access. This is far better than the software scheduling that bogs down RPis and makes it very difficult to do timing intensive tasks.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Except that the SoC they're using already has two PRU coprocessors designed for realtime IO support, and they have the advantage of being able to DMA to and from main memory rather than being limited to a slow serial link to the main CPU.
Arduino's appeal is that doing simple tasks is simple. The PRU is not easy. TI introduced a C compiler for the PRU last year, but until then it has been an assembly only affair. (I haven't tried the compiler, I just discovered it while fact checking the first draft of this comment.)