Old MIPS/ARM PDAs for Teaching? 10
"It seems like companies must be sending 128k MIPS handhelds to the landfill at this point, so giving them to us to use in teaching would be a win/win, since they'd get a tax writeoff and some good will instead. But even if they cost $20/ea, that would be fine. Any suggestions on what hardware to use, or what companies to contact? Remember, there must be a convenient way to download executable code into them, using a cable rather than a flash ROM. And we're pretty much a Debian GNU/Linux shop, so a working cross-compiler based on the GNU toolset would be best. An emulator would be even peachier, so students could debug without downloading the code after each little change, although that's not strictly necessary."
SPIM! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:SPIM! (Score:3, Interesting)
And, perhaps if done correctly, the student could keep the PDA with his/her code. After all, if PDAs are constantly becoming obsolete, turnover shouldn't be a problem, right?
--jcwren
Re:SPIM! (Score:1)
Since the whole world is going embedded, and increasingly, battery-operated, the two CPU's that are most practical to teach about are (a) ARM (most mips per watt), and (b) 8051 (when you absolutely positively don't need 200 mips to start with
There is an alternative to a PDA (Score:1)
The gameboy advance(d?) is another possibility: probably more expensive but much easier to get hold of. I've been told that they're based on an ARM7 core.
In both cases, you get enough peripherals for some interesting programming challenges. Seeing your program output to the LCD is a far more rewarding experience than examining the result in a register or a set of memory locations. Also, I'd expect their architectures to be very simple - their hardware is very well understood, and other than their compactness nowhere near cutting edge (and so no bizarre hacks required).
Ian Woods
Re:There is an alternative to a PDA (Score:1)
Re:There is an alternative to a PDA (Score:1)
Here's a thought... (Score:1)
If you are going to teach computer architecture... (Score:2)
I think you will get much more mileage out of teaching students on the x86 architecture. You can get a good emulator [sourceforge.net] and also run things on a regular PC, depending. Most of your problem sets should fit on a 1.44MB floppy, which means that you can just boot an existing computer off of the floppy drive. Write a few pieces of code to make the student's life easier -- i.e. loading an executable image into memory and stuff.