[Ovmsdev] OVMS v3 - Microcontroller

[HONDA S-2000]

I agree with the basic idea of a low-power CAN bridge/gateway. It might even make sense to keep it simple with only serial connections to expander boards, whether USB, SPI, or something along those lines.

Radio - whether WiFi or cellular - seems to add a lot in terms of power requirements, not to mention the restrictions on placement within the car and the casing so that radio waves are not blocked. Is it absolutely necessary to have radio on the base model?

In any event, lots of on-board storage is a good idea, whether it's CPU Flash or external. The external can be SMD on the board, or removable cards. Putting an extra parallel or serial Flash chip on board could be a lot cheaper than having a removable card, but I haven't done price comparisons.

Basically, I think that a design like the Raspberry Pi, with it's full operating system, is quite a bit overkill in terms of power and capability. A much smaller system seems to make more sense, provided that 2 to 4 CAN busses are possible. I'm open to any design so long as it's not power hungry, because I don't want it draining the battery.

I still have one of the OVMS v2 models, but I must confess that I've not done any development with it despite having lots of Microchip PIC programming experience.

Brian


On Feb 1, 2016, at 5:13 PM, Mark Webb-Johnson <mark at webb-johnson.net> wrote:
> That is the general idea. Provide a base platform that people could use for all sorts of things.
> 
> But, the choice of operating system and platform type has a big bearing on this. If we want to do things like instrument clusters, infotainment, car PCs, etc, then the platform is very different than one intended as an embedded CAN gateway. The processor power requirement to take 4 video streams and real-time stitch them into a single overhead camera view, is non trivial. There is a conflict there for the low power requirement.
> 
> Regards, Mark.