Pi as developing board for ARM9 board and how to start my project

Ulrich, it's very interesting to hear that you're involved in KNX interfacing and control.  We have previously touched on fieldbus use (over in the BBB or SBC non-group), but that was for the industrial EtherCAT fieldbus which has relatively little traction compared to the more residentially oriented KNX.  Home and building automation seems very likely to bloom in the next few decades, so this is a promising topic with which to be involved.

One of the benefits of KNX which promotes its success is that it allows many different  topologies and physical implementations rather than being narrowly prescriptive.  On the downside though, while KNX has registered "standards" very widely (EN 50090, EN 13321-1, ISO/IEC 14543), the organization behind KNX seems rather inimical to open source, open hardware, and even open specification, so supporting them is not very palatable nor helpful.  With enough open source interest in KNX though, perhaps their eyes can be opened a bit.  Work like yours could help there.

Here's an article from a KNX conference which sounds like it might bear some relevance to your work:  "Controlling EIB/KNX devices from Linux using USB".  You haven't said to which KNX physical medium you're intending to couple, and KNX specifies all of TP, Powerline, RF, and Ethernet/IP, but they all have USB interfaces so this article is probably applicable to a wide range of KNX systems.

Even better, for real code and more ideas, visit these projects:  List of KNX Open Source or free software.

Regarding development platforms for this or any other work, I agree with what others have said here, that at this time, development is best done on a standard x86/amd64 Linux or *BSD box.  This will change as ARM systems get faster, gain more memory and provide better storage interfaces as standard, but right now serious development is much slower and generally less satisfactory when done natively on an ARM board.  For any non-trivial project, cross-compile on your powerful desktop to your desired ARM target.

I'd love to hear more technical details about your project.  The  feedback here is likely to be more helpful the more details you supply.

Hi,

I'm sorry for the late reply I have been on a trip.

Thank you for your replies.

@Derek: When I was reading more about the BBB, I noticed that the issues with Angström are related to what you said (<My impression is that there will always be problems reported when people apply new hardware to their fields of interest.>). So I guess it would be ok as an development board. However, I decided to buy the evaluation board to my MCU to make it more easy to port the software to the final board later.

@Morgaine: Thank you for your information! I have to tell that this is going to be a commercial project.. But since we are a small business I fully understand your difficulties with KNX - obviously there are different ideas of an "open" standard...

My project is going to be initially TP only. Later there might be an update for Ethernet/IP. I'm going to use ready made KNX libraries for the project since it would take to much resources to implement and certify the KNX stack myself.

I'm still not sure which development platform to use. Does it make sense to get an extra linux machine or would developing with PC+Eclipse+debugging on target be good enough?

Have a nice day!

Ulrich

Ulrich Steurenthaler wrote:

 

I'm still not sure which development platform to use. Does it make sense to get an extra linux machine or would developing with PC+Eclipse+debugging on target be good enough?

 

Yes

-J

Ulrich Steurenthaler wrote:

 

I'm still not sure which development platform to use. Does it make sense to get an extra linux machine or would developing with PC+Eclipse+debugging on target be good enough?

 

Yes

-J