The surprise feature we have now is RLP. You can now run native code on ANY GHI product, yes that includes FEZ Panda! Not only that, we have added tasking extensions to RLP. What does this mean? Let us say you want to fly a quadcopter and you must do sampling on an accelerometer every 10ms exactly. You can do that easily with RLP. You can generate PWM easily, a non-blocking software-PWM You can even generate a multi channel outputCompare if you like, someone asked for this. You can do things that were impossible before, like reading those “Chinese calipers”, someone asked for this too!
The tasking extensions run in user mode or kernel mode. When it is setup to run in kernel mode, it gets a very high priority on the system so even the garbage collector will not effect its timing.
Important note: RLP is locked but it is very easy to unlock it. We only need you to sign an agreement (so you are using RLP for good, not evil). The agreement will be up online tomorrow and once you sign it, you will get an email with code needed to unlock RLP. So, you can’t use RLP today just yet but you can get your PC setup to compile RLP (GCC compiler) if you like and get your project ready. We will have this done tomorrow ASAP.
For those who do not know what is RLP, it is works like DLLs work on your PC. You write an RLP in C or assembly and compile it into an ELF file (we shoe you how in docs) then this ELF file can be loaded in the device memory at runtime. Once it is loaded, you can access the methods inside just like you do on a DLL.
Yes NETMF can now do real time and yes the sky is the limit with RLP.
… do not forget about the other exciting features on this SDK, HTTP/DHCP on Panda, parallel port…
and oh yes, there is another surprise coming very soon so stay tuned!
You know what would be really crazy Bob? Add FreeRTOS (or any OS) to FEZ using RLP You will have a native threading system plus NETMF managed system running in sync on the same system.
Shall we we start a new contest? We haven’t had one in a while
Maybe after unrevealing the next surprise … we got a line of those surprises and they are all as good as this one
Cool. Now if we can just get MS onboard to smooth that out. So we can “inline” C inside c# methods or lambdas and compile and deploy in same method as today. Why we need another tool like gcc? What about c++ express?
Ahh. Thanks gus. I think that ~may change soon as windows platform expanding to ARM platform. I think, internally anyway, they have had such compilers for some time. I think this ties nicely with their 3 screen and the cloud. Small devices is a big part of the strategy so I forsee some new end-to-end paths.
You can even generate a multi channel outputCompare if you like, someone asked for this. You can do things that were impossible before, like reading those “Chinese calipers”, someone asked for this too!
You will have a native threading system plus NETMF managed system running in sync on the same system.
