Reminds me of the old BeagleBone Black that had two small separate cores that worked in a similar way. Someone used it to create a 3D printer control system.
Are there any other chips out there like this?
A lot of microcontrollers also have pretty sophisticated interrupt controllers and timing analyzers which can be used to accomplish similar tasks, although they’re usually “programmed” by chaining register effects so it’s nowhere near as elegant as PIO.
Specialized IO coprocessors which are programmed using “code” like PIO is are a little less common, Infineon Peripheral Control Processor springs to mind.
Can the “little” cores in big.little arches be run entirely independently then? That’s pretty cool if so.
Well, that too :) What I’m referring to is more like Qualcomm “safety island” on Dragonwing, Xilinx RPU, or Allwinner AR100 (I think this is used in 3D printer projects using A64, actually), though - where most modern large “embedded” Linux SoCs have some real time island to talk to the outside world. Cell phone SoCs and stuff like Apple M also have realtime cores hiding in them running blobs, although they’re usually connected to more specific RF or A/V blocks rather than generic IO.
Which is exactly what GP was talking about: the TI PRU cores are this.
These look great, but I wonder if there's an 800x420ish version out there.
I could see building one with an RP2040 and OLED or Eink display.
deivid•2mo ago