re: Blue Sky

Andrew

There was talk around here earlier about designing and making custom chips
for machine control but that kind of chip making is far different from
"burning a memory chip." The chip burn that I referred to is the process
of loading a bunch of memory into an already manufactured read only memory
(ROM). These ROM chips are fairly common and easily customized for devices
like this. Most of the handheld and portable devices made today use some
form of ROM to hold their operating system. Many use erasable programmable
read only memory (EPROM) so that the end user can reconfigure parts of the
device control on the fly.

But my blue sky idea does raise the price because it distributes the
machine control task between at least two computers - the box that I
imagined would only do the motion and machine I/O. A copy of linux and emc
on a ROM chip would do away with the need for a hard drive in that portion
of the machine control and would improve it's reliability.

Some other box would have to do the operator and program interface.


-----om's-----

> From: Andrew Werby <drewid@...>
>Subject: Re: Digest Number 197

>> From: Ray Henry <rehenry@...>
>>Subject: Blue Sky
>>
>>I'd like to see a PC104 or similar format computer with onboard ethernet
>>running embedded (hard hat) linux with a rt patch. This would remove most
>>of the linux install problem because the kernel, the rt patch, and a
>>current release of EMC would be burned in to a memory chip. It's a motion
>>control system that runs right out of the box.
>>
>>New releases of linux, rt, or EMC could be burned in and distributed as a
>>chip. The emc.ini file could be downloaded whenever the PC104 powered up
>>so that changes could be made in EMC for each machine without a new chip
>>being required.
>
>[This sounds like an excellent idea to me. But what does it really take to
>"burn in" a custom chip? I thought this was a megabucks process- has it
>come down recently? ]