[NTLUG:Discuss] uCLinux on ARM7

[Ralph Green]

Howdy,
  I am not an engineer.  I am a hobbyist, but I have played with a bunch
of these little embedded devices.  The arm seems to need a more memory
than some architectures.  Almost every Arm based board I have seen has
64 meg of ram or more.  I do know one that has 64K, so I can't say every
one.  128 meg or 256 meg are common.  You don't say anything about what
your application will be doing.  A pretty full featured Linux without a
gui would probably take 1 gig of flash.  I just built one that was a
smidge over 512 meg.  I could probably cut it down to 512 meg, but I
wanted this to be pretty well featured and I can't find 512 meg CF cards
that are cheap, anyway.  A very simple router device might be 32 meg of
flash.  128 meg of flash is more common for somewhat advanced routers.
If you have the space, try to use a CF card for the flash.  That way,
you can put whatever sized card you need.   
 Maybe you ought to come to the Embedded Workshop meeting this Friday
and talk this over with other people there.
Good luck,
Ralph

On Mon, 2009-08-31 at 12:49 -0600, Russell Lemburg wrote:
> Guys,
> We are doing some very preliminary die size estimates for a custom IC we're
> looking to design and build.  The IC will use an ARM7 core, and we'd like to
> run an embedded version of uClinux.  The main reason for using uClinux is to
> support TCP/IP and ZigBee protocols.
> 
> Have you any idea of how much code space (ROM and/or Flash) and RAM we will
> need for this basic configuration (excluding the rest of our application
> software) ?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Russell
> 
>