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Papering over a binary blobPapering over a binary blobPosted Sep 29, 2011 10:01 UTC (Thu) by tau (subscriber, #79651)In reply to: Papering over a binary blob by rvfh Parent article: Papering over a binary blob
This is what I find so remarkable about the whole thing. Even if there was a legitimate need to do this firmware shuffling exercise, the lowliest 8-bit microcontroller would be adequate for shoveling data from an EEPROM onto a simple I2C-like serial bus. Instead they want to use a monstrously powerful multimedia application processor more powerful than the entire machine that sat on my desk just ten years ago? If I didn't know the FSF any better I'd almost say this entire thing is a troll.
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Papering over a binary blob Posted Oct 3, 2011 13:05 UTC (Mon) by TMM (subscriber, #79398) [Link]
Well, the MSP series of chippery is hardly a fully fledged multimedia CPU, the model they chose has 128KB of flash and 10K of RAM.
Assuming they they want to flash the the firmware on the micro itself, it's not such a bad choice, it's reasonably cheap at USD4 considering what they want to achieve.
Yes, they could've done it even cheaper with a separate flash chip, and an even cheaper micro but you have to wonder if will actually work out cheaper consider the extra board complexity.
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