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alibarber 13 hours ago

Yeah - I don't really consider this comparable for my uses which rely heavily on the DSP and processing power of the Teensy itself either.

Drama and whatnot aside I'm not really sure why anyone would buy the (considerably more expensive) Teensy over something RP based if RP was suitable for their needs already.

Interestingly despite being a Teensy fan I have found myself reaching more towards the RP when I can because I can't stand the Arduino API and much prefer the RP SDK. I do use Teensy without Teensyduino (Makefile based) and also a bit of the CMSIS-DSP stuff directly - but it's kinda clunky IMO.

ahepp 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I've been interested to hear more about use cases for these "hybrid" MCUs, can you share a bit about why you chose that over something like a Cortex-A running linux, or an SoC with -A and -M cores?

alibarber 10 hours ago | parent [-]

It's a good question - unfortunately I don't really have a good answer...

Almost all of my embedded activities are for a my own hobby purposes, and I just like the ability to go 'as low as I can' with projects on MCUs. It's nice to be able to use the device's peripherals as much as possible (hardware DSP etc) and I'm not confident in how I'd do that on a Linux based system. I'm in to building my own ham radio Software Defined receivers and it's nice to keep it completely real time.

If I were to be doing this stuff professionally (and I am very close to people who do at work) then yeah I'd probably be using Zephyr or something.

ahepp 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Ah interesting! I work on (very expensive) SDRs and we make pretty heavy use of Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale SoCs. They combine Cortex-A, Cortex-R, and FPGA fabric all in one package, with some fancy interconnects. So you can handle the hard realtime stuff on an RTOS or in the FPGA, then send the data over to the application processor with a hard float ALU to crunch some numbers (or build some kind of dsp IP into the FPGA, idk much about that side of it).

I've also seen some cool stuff with the BeagleBone products, which have a few TI custom architecture DSPs and "realtime units" which you can communicate with via Linux.

But yeah, I can certainly see how just doing it all on a super fast MCU could be easier and cheaper without the backing of commercial enterprises.

I've always thought it would be cool to design a "poor man's zynq" hat for a SBC. Stick a RP3050 and a Lattice FPGA on there and set up some SPI / UART connections.