Has anyone considered running Inferno on an XMOS system? Their StartKIT is US$15 (plus US$30 P&P to Australia, which is a bugbear, otherwise I'd get one), and an 8Mbyte SDRAM "slice" (their name for an expansion card) is US$40. I seem to remember seeing Inferno live natively in as low as 2Mbyte of RAM. Additionally, the StartKIT provides an RPi 26 pin header for expansion cards developed for the RPi.

From what I understand, FreeRTOS has been ported, and modules exist for SPI, UART, I2C, etc. There is also in interboard link port next to the RPi alike port on the StartKIT so one could conceivably have IEEE1588 ethernet on one board (with ethernet slice), and Inferno running on the other board with 8Mbyte of RAM. Or am I barking up the wrong tree here?

I have a need for a controller (or two, linked together as the case may have you) that talks ethernet, talks TTL serial, talks SPI, and talks I2C over an RPi alike port. I'd like it to be a hard, real time system, and the XMOS chips are quite deterministic in that regard.

Anyway, these are all just thoughts, as mentioned, I could be full of it, I'm not making any guarantees.

Thanks all!

Shane.