tofro wrote:Dave,
have you touched an embedded system the last 10 years? Agreed the Q68 would be nice for embedded applications - For QL tinkerers.
But there's wonders to find out there, for about $5 each, that had 30 years of time to develop, with free development environments we can only dream of in the QL world. I'm afraid a 68000-based system wouldn't stand the slightest chance against these systems.
Tobias
A small part of my embedded work is with Pi Zero, Pi3B etc. I know their capabilities. I have a Pi3 webserver. I also know if you mount a PiZero in a car in Texas, with the CPU not being auto rated the thermals are impossible. There's automotive rated FPGAs and RAM of the type used in the Q68. For flexible data display and logging purposes, SMSQ on reasonable yet simple hardware beats Pi/Linux or arduino hands down. It definitely beats 68K assembly on no OS, which is what is being used now.
That's without even mentioning vibration.
If anything, those more powerful systems also cause too much overhead: long booting times for Linux (vehicle could move several hundred meters before a Pi even boots let alone launches software, checks timestamp of last logfile, etc etc...) and more complex coding. The Q68 is just right for this job, would give simpler, more lean hardware that would fit the task better, is quick enough, a better development environment, etc.
If it dropped ethernet and added a 2nd video output of the 2nd screen area, for 2 LCD support, that would be a small customization making it "more" suited. The extension bus would support a few GPIOs via a CPLD for controlling LED brightness, light level sensing, a few input buttons.... Provision for an onboard EEPROM for storing secured logged data. It cannot be stored on removable or undetectably alterable storage, by federal regulation. On return to base, logged data is transferred to a central system by wifi for long term storage.
The extended purpose of the next version of this product, currently designed around a 68HC000 and a CPLD for IO, is too "fiddly" (their words) and they're open to a bespoke and novel solution if it simplifies their development process. Their big stumbling block is not having an OS that's close to instant on. It's a black box and parameter display type product and has to be logging within 5 seconds of power-good. With a little coding, I think the Q68 system could get from power-good to running a loaded image in under 2s. The two developers at this company are both in their 50s and cut their teeth on Commodore and Tandy using BASIC. SBASIC would be a dream to them.
That's just one real world example.
I would say more, but NDA...
If you think modern products couldn't be built around 68ks, my boat's chartplotter has multiple CPUs including a 68020 which appears to load/retire tiles of map into a cache memory... The GPS, route plotting etc and video generation are done by an older ARM 250. It was built in 2009-2017.