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Let's say you've got something that needs to be computerised at a slightly higher level than an Arduino, with the computing part costing less than about $100-150, and ideally less than $50 (think Beaglebone, Odroid, PCEngine, Pi and clones, Pine, etc). It looks like the only choice is between ARM at the low end and x86 at the high end. Everything else has fallen by the wayside: The last MIPS-based product was the Ci20/Ci40 from 2015 and neither the hardware nor software have been updated since, PowerPC is out there but only as high-priced SBCs and good luck finding a distro that supports it, Sparc is left with Fujitsu working on it for mainframes, and RISC-V is still a glint in everyone's eye - the few SBCs based on it cost more than a low-end server, and despite various enthusiastic press releases I can't see any timeline where I can get a $50 RISC-V device that performs the same as a $50 ARM-based one. And then there's the software support, once you leave the x86 world you've got, outside of various specialised RTOSes, Linux. A very few systems have one or two of the BSDs, often in a hit-and-miss manner, but that's it.
Has Linux + ARM/x86 killed everything else?
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday February 21 2019, @02:22AM (1 child)
In my case I really want something that's self-hosted (which I should have mentioned in the OP). I spend way too much work time interacting with systems via ICEs and similar, so in my free time I want something I can just ssh into and make any needed changes that way. Admittedly the 5V Arm-based systems are nice that way, you drop them in wherever you need them, run 12 or 24V out to them, and locally drop whatever the voltage is by the time it gets there to the required 5V via a UBEC. The WiFi support has also slowly, painfully got better over time, in that you can mostly rely on it remaining network-connected between software updates/upgrades, although running wired ethernet to a WiFi bridge is the way to go for guaranteed reliability.
Still wish there was something other than Arm/Intel to work with though...
(Score: 2) by Rich on Friday February 22 2019, @12:15PM
What about MicroPython on the ESP32? Checks all the boxes, not? Oddball CPU and REPL shell over WiFi should be doable (funnily enough, ssh shell seemed to be a challenge for them, but web REPL over https worked, as I read one of the threads). If the language has to be a bit oddball, too, there's LUA RTOS which comes with the dropbear ssh server. Board costs a fiver from China, tenner local. A bit more downscale, it can run the Arduino libs (with OTA access from the IDE), and bit more upscale, if it's got to be really UNIX-like, ESP32 will also run NuttX, but they seem to have an issue with getting wifi firmware they can use.