hardware for monitoring project with FreeRTOS

jesperv wrote on Tuesday, April 21, 2009:

I’m planning on creating a little monitoring device and need a little help with choosing hardware board.

The device must be able to collect data through analogue and digital inputs and then present them to a user through a web server. I have been looking on some of the demo’s on the FreeRTOS website but the amount of boards available on the market gets me all confused.

Can someone please link me to a board supported by FreeRTOS that would be a good start for this project. Size and price matter.

Regards

Jesper

spacewrench wrote on Tuesday, April 21, 2009:

Take a look at SparkFun: www.sparkfun.com.  They’re a hobbyist support site where people seem to build lots of projects like yours.  They have a wide range of microcontroller boards available.  The tricky / expensive part of your project is the web-server bit.  You’ll need a board with an Ethernet interface, or a USB interface and a LOT of programming skill.

For example:

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=ethernet

jesperv wrote on Tuesday, April 21, 2009:

It is actually a student project i’m doing for a little company and even though the requirements for such a project is small, they want some hardware (maybe AVR32 or ARM7) they can use in future for  more resource intensive projects.
I bought my Arduino board at Sparkfun but didnt know that they were selling other kinds of microcontrollers.

jesperv wrote on Thursday, April 23, 2009:

I have narrowed it down to these boards.

LPC2468
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8854

GESBC-9260S
http://www.glomationinc.com/product_9260S.html

ATNGW100
http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/tools_card.asp?tool_id=4102

LPC-E2124
http://www.olimex.com/dev/lpc-e2124.html

Can anyone tell me to what extent these boards are supported by FreeRTOS?

jesperv wrote on Friday, April 24, 2009:

Has no one tried one of the board?

djg wrote on Friday, April 24, 2009:

Those board have a wide range of capabilities. If the LPC-E2124 is sufficient for your needs you may want to look at the  http://www.luminarymicro.com/products/lm3s6965_ethernet_evaluation_kit.html

It has more ram and is supported by FreeRTOS with a web server demo.
http://www.freertos.org/portlm3sx965.html

I have used it and it seems to work well using FreeRTOS and the Luminary driver library. With the existing port you can’t use the micro SD and the display at the same time (unless recent versions have fixed that). I have modified my version to allow it to work but its against 4.7.2 but  haven’t finished porting to the current version.

With this class of boards the Ethernet and web server have very basic capabilities to fit in the available resources.