PaulStoffregen
Well-known member
Isn't uTasker a one-time fee of $485 or $765? (and thereafter, you use it royalty free, regardless of how many copies you ship) Does a "low cost retail product" mean something that's manufactured in China in at 50,000 to 250,000 quantity? If you think $500 is too much for a one-time expense, and you really are developing a high-volume retail product, I'm sure you'll have plenty of unpleasant experiences along the way!
But if you really want free, I believe Frank is working on this right now and just published something yesterday. Maybe you should give Frank's code a try. If it doesn't fully meet all your needs, maybe you could help to improve it?
As far as PJRC is concerned, I hear your "have a leg up on the Arduino camp" thought. Really, I do. I've seen you're asking the same thing on their forum too.
Just to be perfectly clear, I'm not planning to work on this feature, at least not anytime soon. Part of my reasoning is uTasker and Frank are already on it. But mostly, I have an incredibly long list of other far more urgent things in development. Some examples: USB MTP & Audio, Teensy++ 3.x, completing the SD library optimizations, further pre-fetching and DMA optimizations on SD when we get Teensy++ hardware, ways to enable SWD/JTAG debug, about 100 feature requests on the Audio library, and the upcoming motion+light+sound peripheral board (oh, look, another new product hint leaked....)
FWIW, uTasker has been around for a very long time and has a very impressive list of features. Until recently, much of that stuff didn't have any usable free alternatives. Arduino and FreeRTOS and other projects are slowly changing the landscape, much like how Linux shook up the commercial Unix marketplace 15+ years ago. Long term, I and Frank and many others will probably do all this stuff and much, much more. But it's a very long and slow process. Much of the work is open source contributions by unpaid volunteers, and people like me who are financially supported by sales of low-cost products. With cheap Asian clones and subsidized hardware from semiconductor manufacturers flooding the market, it's a very indirect and slow approach (burdened with running a hardware company) compared to traditional software licensing revenue. The way this open source stuff works is you roll up your sleeves and contribute.
But if you really want free, I believe Frank is working on this right now and just published something yesterday. Maybe you should give Frank's code a try. If it doesn't fully meet all your needs, maybe you could help to improve it?
As far as PJRC is concerned, I hear your "have a leg up on the Arduino camp" thought. Really, I do. I've seen you're asking the same thing on their forum too.
Just to be perfectly clear, I'm not planning to work on this feature, at least not anytime soon. Part of my reasoning is uTasker and Frank are already on it. But mostly, I have an incredibly long list of other far more urgent things in development. Some examples: USB MTP & Audio, Teensy++ 3.x, completing the SD library optimizations, further pre-fetching and DMA optimizations on SD when we get Teensy++ hardware, ways to enable SWD/JTAG debug, about 100 feature requests on the Audio library, and the upcoming motion+light+sound peripheral board (oh, look, another new product hint leaked....)
FWIW, uTasker has been around for a very long time and has a very impressive list of features. Until recently, much of that stuff didn't have any usable free alternatives. Arduino and FreeRTOS and other projects are slowly changing the landscape, much like how Linux shook up the commercial Unix marketplace 15+ years ago. Long term, I and Frank and many others will probably do all this stuff and much, much more. But it's a very long and slow process. Much of the work is open source contributions by unpaid volunteers, and people like me who are financially supported by sales of low-cost products. With cheap Asian clones and subsidized hardware from semiconductor manufacturers flooding the market, it's a very indirect and slow approach (burdened with running a hardware company) compared to traditional software licensing revenue. The way this open source stuff works is you roll up your sleeves and contribute.