It's certainly true that AVR and friends aren't powerful enough to run a pike interpreter, but they're also much simpler, smaller and also use a fraction of the power that any ARM would use. I'm surprised that you'd be able to get an ARM for less than an AVR... you must have better sources than I.
The chip that they're targeting for this project runs about $12 in quantities less than 100 and they're selling the board for about $25. ST sells a discovery board using the same chip as the micropython developer board, but without the card reader for $14. you can put an RTOS like nuttx on it. If Pike ran under that, you might be in business without having to resort to a "micro pike".
bill
On Wed, 7 May 2014, Stephen R. van den Berg wrote:
Bill Welliver wrote:
The really affordable MCUs, such as AVRs and PICs, are probably just too slow to be useful.
Well, actually, forget the AVRs and PICs. One can get ARM MCUs with everything onboard (except USB) for EUR 0.55. Which is close enough or cheaper than most AVRs and PICs. The first thing that does USB as well as ARM, is something like EUR 2.10 (way cheaper than ATxmega). So 8-bit MCUs have become obsolete as far as I am concerned.
In the case of micropython, I suspect that the micropython interpreter is the firmware flashed to the MCU and that they're using some sort of flash card to store the libraries and script to run,
They do interpreter and libs on the flash, but have a 1MB flash for that. But, in case of an MCU, the amount of libraries required is close to none.
But, like I said, the 1MB flash is larger than I'm willing to put in most small MCU designs.
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