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Subject: 
Re: mindstorms NXT and memory
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.robotics
Date: 
Mon, 9 Jan 2006 03:29:25 GMT
Viewed: 
9162 times
  
In lugnet.robotics, steve <sjbaker1@airmail.net> wrote:

The point is that having such an incredibly small amount of memory
(by modern standards) forces you into ugly compromise solutions from
your shiney new system from day #1.

   I'm curious - I'm a physicist, not by any means a hardware type. What *is* a
standard amount of on-board FLASH for a embedded system? The NXT uses some sort
of ARM processor (what the heck does that stand for anyway?) - how FLASH-rish do
these come? And how hard is it to mate such a CPU chip with another chip or two
of FLASH?

If this system is going to be around for the same amount of time as
the RCX (what? nearly 10 years now?) - it ought not to look antiquated
from the very beginning.

   Well, to be fair, the same could safely be said of the RCX. It had less RAM
ten years ago than my Apple ][ did more than 20 years ago!

You can buy Flash memory USB 'thumb drives' for $8.50 in quantity
with anywhere from 128Mbytes upwards.

   How hard is it to interface a thumb drive with a device like the ARM? From
other discussion here the difference between slave and master USB devices seems
to be important. How much extra hardware or software do you need to make
something like the NXT a USB master device, so it could handle things like a
thumb drive?

I'm so horrified about this that I'm half convinced that this must
be a mis-print and that the NXT *surely* has 128Mb and not 128Kb.

   With Bluetooth at least we'll have access to potentially a whole computer's
worth of memory (at a slower rate? I really need to learn about Bluetooth).

--
Brian Davis



Message has 2 Replies:
  Re: mindstorms NXT and memory
 
(...) Since I'm an engineer, I will give you the standard engineering answer: Depends on the requirements! :-) (...) (URL) ARM architecture has been around for years and has been a very effective RISC based embeddded CPU core. That Wiki article does (...) (19 years ago, 9-Jan-06, to lugnet.robotics)
  Re: mindstorms NXT and memory
 
(...) It depends on the application obviously...but thinking of consumer devices that cost around the same ballpark as the NXT and which are likely to be sold in similar quantities, we have PDA's, handheld games, MP3 players and digital cameras. * (...) (19 years ago, 9-Jan-06, to lugnet.robotics)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: mindstorms NXT and memory
 
(...) You could - but I might want to store more than one bit of information per square inch (eg a 'confidence' figure or a 'time since last mapped' number - or to store multiple maps so I can see how the map is changing over time). The point is (...) (19 years ago, 9-Jan-06, to lugnet.robotics)

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