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Newbie Questions



First, thanks for reading this and having tolerance for my ignorance ... <grin>

I have a (relatively) simple project to perform some computational tasks 
using an
embedded microcontroller.  The complexity comes from the need for transparency
in both the hardware and software.  By transparency, I mean that the 
software and
hardware must be as simple as possible, contain minimal extra features, and
that the software must be completely available in source code form.  Open 
source
code is preferable to proprietary source code.

The other complication is the need to run solely off ROM and RAM with no
writeable, non-volatile memory (flash, eeprom, battery backed up RAM, etc).

The first "project" is to monitor some switches (digital inputs), wait for 
a short ASCII
message from 1 or 2 serial ports, do some simple math on the result, and 
light some
lights using digital outputs.

Later projects would be more complex, including communicating with other
microcontrollers controlling various kinds of sensors over serial and ethernet.

I am a software guy, so my bias would be to buy someone else's board, and start
writing software for it.  This also would allow the (hopefully) inherent 
increase
in reliability of a commercial board, instead of a one-off custom design.

The daughter boards from Cogent seem to be a possibility, but I am unclear
whether they can be seperated from the motherboards.

ECOS seems the natural solution to the problem for a number of reasons: 
small footprint,
open source OS and tools (compilers, debuggers, etc), multiple targets, 
expandable
level capabilities (simple serial communication to complex TCP/IP apps).

Previous implementations were PC/104 x86 machines with BIOS, MSDOS and
Visual C implementations.  They contained lots of closed source code, flash
memory and weren't too stable over the long haul.

I have looked through the supported evaluation boards at the ECOS supported
hardware list, but none seem to be the right set of features.

Some questions...

1.  Am I headed in the right direction for the OS choice?

2.  Would another OS choice be better?

3.  Any suggestions on hardware choices or options would be appreciated.

4.  Am I completely clueless and should be taken out back and put out of my 
misery <grin>?

Thanks in advance,
Greg


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