3 ms·

I am most worried about the hardware. I am afraid we will have to start all the progress completely from scratch.

• speed_spread 4y ago
  IMHO, modern microcontrollers is where it's at when it comes to preserving the current technological base. They're 32 bits and relatively high powered, yet cheap and reliable enough. They don't need cooling and are robust to be fed from different power sources. If you base your software stack on, say, the ARM Cortex M4 or even M0+, you should be good for long time. You can stash a lot of spare parts and can maintain boards using simple soldering techniques.
  • kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    Devices running on high density flash will not be reliable long term. None of these devices have ECC to reduce the probability of catastrophic failure from accumulated bit flips.
    • speed_spread 4y ago
      I was thinking more about devices that can be repaired by changing a failed CPU than devices that have a lower failure rate. I believe STM (and others surely) has a line of "process critical" MCUs that may have additional reliability features but these chips are built in much lower quantity and are much pricier. It's a tradeoff that would need to be evaluated for sure. Preferring external flash to on-chip storage would also help. Some ECC can also be performed in software where warranted.
      • makapuf 4y ago
        Problem is that stm32 parts are currently in a kind of post apocalyptic state, speaking of supply chain
    • elcritch 4y ago
      Many modern MCU's do have ECC flash, and I'm seeing many claiming 20 year stability. It's also common to have backup firmware images in case the primary firmware image gets corrupted. It's trivial to re-flash an MCU to fix a corrupted image.