Another low cost WiFi open source board

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stevech

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Another example of what amazingly low cost small format boards give us... This one costs about the same as a Raspberry Pi Zero + WiFi dongle combo.

http://www.seeed.cc/linkit_smart_7688/

$13 or $16. The latter "includes" an Atmel AVR (coprocessor?).
MIPS MCU (somewhat odd?) MIPS24KEc 580 MHz
Gobs of flash and RAM.
Ethernet interface but RJ45 is off-board.
USB host SPI, UART, etc.

Runs OpenWrt Linux - I assume that GCC supports MIPS.

Personally, I've purchased some ESP8266-based boards and an RPi Zero and others, and fiddled with all. I don't like the ESP8266 due to it suffering from being too cheap -and all that brings (bad docs, trial and error, etc.). The WiFi'd RPi Zero has been great in tests I've been doing with it and an Xbee piggyback board - as a home automation hub with all the app code in quick and easy Python. Remotely located Xbee do sensor data acquisition and transmission (A/D, GPIOs, pin change, etc) - with no MCU or code; Xbee's stock firmware does it all. Just code at the hub.
 
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Does GCC support MIPS? Yes.

FWIW, I worked at OSF (Open Software Foundation) from 1989 to 1994, and one of the 3 hardware platforms that I supported GCC on was a MIPS based platform (DECstation 3100), and by the time I started there, the basic MIPS port was fully operational. From 1994 through 2002 when I was at Cygnus Solutions and later Red Hat, I made various modifications to the MIPS compiler to add support for new instruction sets for different chipsets. I see that others have made modifications since then. Now, there might be the odd new instruction added by a particular chipset that isn't supported, but the basic MIPS support should work (and Linux support is rather hard if you don't have GCC).
 
Way back, I worked on a large image processing project. We used Sun SPARCs for some time, then moved to the MIPS-based DEC Alpha which was at the time MUCH faster than the SPARC, and was 64 bits. The DEC Alpha's speed and memory size allowed us to do some first-time-ever-done-in-software image processing on huge images. DEC had their own Unix variant OS ... kind of like what Apple OS X did long thereafter. This was well before OOP and C++.

Isn't the Microchip PIC32 (super proprietary/closed) using a MIPS based design (under license?)
 
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