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Not just that it's doing more. A small microcontroller will run in realtime with completely repeatable and testable operation, whereas a pi running linux cannot
by johnwalkr 4y ago
Not just that it's doing more. A small microcontroller will run in realtime with completely repeatable and testable operation, whereas a pi running linux cannot run a program like this.
Even though I claim pi is the de facto standard for getting started, a microcontroller controlling the stepper motors is a technically improved solution.
You will probably be interested to check out the beaglebone series of boards. They are less of a de facto standard but they are popular enough. Their CPUs have two 200Mhz 32bit microcontroller cores running in realtime. They can directly share the same memory as the ARM cores so you can have the best of both worlds on one computer.
- steve_adams_86 4y agoI've been interested in the Beaglebones. They seem much better suited to the types of things I build, and while they aren't super affordable, they're much cheaper than a Pi right now. Do you know of any obvious drawbacks with beagles? I can imagine the community is smaller, so there would be fewer peripherals and libraries to choose from. Generally speaking I don't really need that, though. Sometimes off-the-shelf solutions are even unappealing because I enjoy learning, or I don't want to hit edge-cases where it doesn't quite fit my use case.
- johnwalkr 4y agoYou hit the nail on the head. The community and number of useful repositories is smaller. But certainly large enough that you won't be stuck. Aside from that, they don't have MIPI camera interfaces so for anything image related you are limited to USB cameras.