On 4/4/02, 7:13:13 AM, Dan Erickson <coldoneknight@rogers.com> wrote regarding Microcontrollers: > A while back I was expressing interest in writting a watchdog > driver. What really slowed me down was trying to find an actual watchdog > that doesnt already have drivers written for it. I did find a > microcontroller with a watchdog onboard. > Basicly... I need a little information. > http://www.national.com/parametric/0,1850,3474,00.html > That is the link to the microcontroller. What I was wondering is, > what is a microcontroller? what are they used for? can linux even be used > on this thing? and who has one of them? A microcontroller is just a microprocessor with lots of on-chip I/O and timer logic. They usually also have a significant chunk of EEPROM program memory and usually a bit of RAM on the chip, too. So you can use a microcontroller and a tiny bit of interface logic to implement a complete embedded system. Often, microcontrollers are I/O-enhanced versions of general-purpose microprocessors. For example, the Motorola MC6811 is the microcontroller version of the 6809, IIRC. As to whether Linux can run on the particular chip you're looking at, I don't know. I did a google search for "Linux" + various terms from the web page you cited above, and didn't get any hits, so there may not be a port to that particular chip yet. Cheers, -- Joe Using open-source softwae: free. Pissing Bill Gates off: priceless. -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
