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My lab has some modern equipment (high-speed eye trackers) uses DOS host computers. The whole system is closer to an appliance than a general-purpose computer.
by mattkrause 5y ago
My lab has some modern equipment (high-speed eye trackers) uses DOS host computers.
The whole system is closer to an appliance than a general-purpose computer. You start the data acquisition software (literally one keystroke--we have it aliased to "t"), set some options with the keyboard, and the data is streamed out over ethernet or a DAC.
The fact that nothing else is running in the background makes it pretty easy to keep real-time guarantees and the fact that it's DOS keeps people from messing with it. I have no doubt that you could probably get a modern Windows/nix system to run the tracker AND do other stuff, but I really doubt it would be worth the effort--it works surprisingly well.
- zozbot234 5y agoYou'd probably reimplement this stuff on a microcontroller, rather. Perhaps interfacing with a general purpose system for configuration and data output.
- tenebrisalietum 5y agoWouldn't an implementation of the DOS API basically fit on any modern microcontroller these days?
- anthk 5y agoYou mean the X86 BIOS? No.
- tadfisher 5y agoThere is already a working PC emulator for ESP32, and the 86duino is a thing.
- anthk 5y agoUnusable for near real time tasks DOS did.
- mattkrause 5y agoThe equipment I have is doing some real-time image processing on a 2000 Hz video stream (it extracts head/eye positions for vision research). I'm sure there's some sort of "microcontroller" that can do this, but an Arduino isn't it. If they had massive volume, I'm sure an ASIC could do it too, but since it's a niche application, an COTS x86 might be near the sweet spot of price/hassle.
- Koshkin 5y agoHow so? The 8086 emulated on ESP32 is faster than the real one.
- quietbritishjim 5y ago"Real time" does not mean fast. It just means with guaranteed (or at least predictable) performance.