3 ms·

That has an appeal, but it lacks the peripherals and support that comes with the raspberry pi. The great things about the pi, if not the greatest, is the sheer

That has an appeal, but it lacks the peripherals and support that comes with the raspberry pi. The great things about the pi, if not the greatest, is the sheer amount of documentation for doing all sorts of things. Trying to get access to the i2c on an intel board? yeah its possible, but its not easy.

numpad0 6y ago
It shouldn’t be hard to use a PCIe GPIO card in a PC for bare metal programming or “in conjunction with third party OS such as MS-DOS(R) or Linux(tm)”, factory automation companies might still be doing exactly that. I think why those are not brought up often is cost.
- mbreese 6y ago
  If you really want to do something like that, you could always connect an Arduino or RPi (or similar) to a PC over serial/USB. Then you could use it as a kinda-gateway device. Taking commands from the primary PC and interfacing with low level peripherals over i2c, etc. But for the cost of this, it would probably make more sense to just wired the gateways up directly to Ethernet to allow one system to control all of the devices... which is how I imagine most factory automation is done. No need to have an extra PC to manage network control when an Arduino can do that by itself. Aside from the hobby aspect, one reason why Arduino and RPi are so popular for these types of projects is that they are effectively cheap enough to devote to an individual project. You’d wouldn’t want to devote an entire PC just to manage a sensor or control a door, or... but an Arduino for $10 or RPi for $30, sure.
squarefoot 6y ago
There are small and cheap adapters to take a serial/USB line and transform it into a i2c one, but the i2c bus on most motherboards is already accessible and documented because it's what operating systems use to read various sensors on the board. https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.12/driver-api/i2c.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.12/driver-api/i2c.html If the i2c but is used for example to do r/w on gpios, then other products can be used, for example: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/usb-io-board/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/usb-io-board/

numpad0 6y ago

It shouldn’t be hard to use a PCIe GPIO card in a PC for bare metal programming or “in conjunction with third party OS such as MS-DOS(R) or Linux(tm)”, factory automation companies might still be doing exactly that. I think why those are not brought up often is cost.

mbreese 6y ago
If you really want to do something like that, you could always connect an Arduino or RPi (or similar) to a PC over serial/USB. Then you could use it as a kinda-gateway device. Taking commands from the primary PC and interfacing with low level peripherals over i2c, etc. But for the cost of this, it would probably make more sense to just wired the gateways up directly to Ethernet to allow one system to control all of the devices... which is how I imagine most factory automation is done. No need to have an extra PC to manage network control when an Arduino can do that by itself. Aside from the hobby aspect, one reason why Arduino and RPi are so popular for these types of projects is that they are effectively cheap enough to devote to an individual project. You’d wouldn’t want to devote an entire PC just to manage a sensor or control a door, or... but an Arduino for $10 or RPi for $30, sure.

squarefoot 6y ago

There are small and cheap adapters to take a serial/USB line and transform it into a i2c one, but the i2c bus on most motherboards is already accessible and documented because it's what operating systems use to read various sensors on the board. https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.12/driver-api/i2c.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.12/driver-api/i2c.html If the i2c but is used for example to do r/w on gpios, then other products can be used, for example: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/usb-io-board/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/usb-io-board/