Don’t get me wrong, I think that IofT is a cool concept. What I was driving at is that most of the uC’s in use today just don’t have the horsepower to handle a TCP/IP stack AND perform the low level functions that a uC are designed for, if you threw in a OS. Use a Atmel AVR as an example. Could you cram all of that into 32kb of memory? You could do it with serial on a commodore or apple IIe (that makes me feel old just typing that).
The Arduino “shield” approach would work best I think. A uC to handle comm protocols, a uC to handle machine function, and serial eeprom to hold the OS, distributed processing. A trip through the manufacturers catalogs should reveal some nice gems to exploit. I think that after years of “wintel” software bloat, the newest crop of programmers are rediscovering the concept of “code efficiency”.
Points all taken. I just think that the industry moves in some very consistent directions
- Make platforms easy to develop for.
- Memory is getting cheaper - expect more and more of it.
- Stuff is getting smaller - expect smaller and smaller packages.
- The SOC paradigm is a powerful one - expect more of it as well.
- With the containers paradigm there is also the trend towards same platform/environment everywhere which feeds back to #1 above.
Put all these together and this seems quite believable to me. It’s not the past but it could well be the future.