Tools

When we started this project a development board manufactured by Olimex - the LPC-P2148 (http://www.olimex.com/dev/lpc-p2148.html), featuring an ARM7TDMI-S microcontroller, together with the ENC28J60-H (http://www.olimex.com/dev/enc28j60-h.html) Ethernet breakout board - looked quite promising.

Software was to be build on top of FreeRTOS (http://www.freertos.org).

Turned out that the FreeRTOS port for the board was based on a pretty outdated version of FreeRTOS as well as the TCP/IP stack, uIP (http://www.sics.se/~adam/uip/index.php/Main_Page).

Right now we're working on a couple of different approaches.

• First one focuses on a minimalistic setup, with only modest requirements regarding resources.

This is done with the AVR-NET-IO (distributed by Pollin, http://www.pollin.de/shop/dt/MTQ5OTgxOTk-/Bausaetze_Module/Bausaetze/Bausatz_AVR_NET_IO.html), using a ATMega644 MCU. Software will be implemented on top of Ethersex (http://www.ethersex.de/index.php/Main_Page), there's even a short demo already available on Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWyo-2PWCHA).

• Second one makes use of the Stellaris EKC-LM3S6965 development board (http://www.ti.com/tool/ekc-lm3s6965), which is built around a ARM Cortex-M3 MCU. Software could be done with FreeRTOS or even with eLua (http://www.eluaproject.net/), which is a port of the Lua language (http://wwww.lua.org) for a quite broad range of microcontrollers.
• Last but not least we're looking into using a even more powerful board, e.g. the RaspberryPi (http://www.raspberrypi.org/) or the Beaglebone (http://beagleboard.org/bone/) running a full-blown Linux OS for advanced stuff like autoguiding with a (USB-)webcam, satellite tracking and the likes.