Trying to build a machine that does multiple things: GPS, touch screen, computing, microphone, camera, motor control, wireless internet, etc. Any advice? I've heard Raspberry Pi, Arduino, etc. New to this whole thing...

Any smartphone?

As far as I know, Arduino is easy to get started, but Raspberry pi has more versatility and computing power.

Any modern operating system is multi-threading/multi-tasking. Multi-tasking is not feature of machine, but operating system. It can be implemented on machines which don't have multi-core CPU *). In such case, time of single CPU, is split to various tasks by interrupts. e.g. one (i.e. OS creator-programmer) can make interrupt routine which is called 50 times per second, and switches active task.

 

*) There can be CPU features which help making multi-tasking operating system, such as in e.g. Motorola 680x0 MOVEM.L instruction which allows storing/restoring the all CPU registers with just single instruction. Helpful can be also atomic increase/decrease, and disable/enable interrupts instructions.

 

12 hours ago, couch_potato said:

Trying to build a machine that does multiple things: GPS, touch screen, computing, microphone, camera, motor control, wireless internet, etc.

Before making device which does the all these things at the same time, you should master each of them alone in separate devices..

38 minutes ago, Bender said:

Any smartphone?

That would be the easiest way to do it. Dismount smartphone, and write Android application in Java..

 

 

...so, download Android SDK, and try making application which will read GPS locations from your smartphone, and put them in database, for a start..

 

Edited July 8, 20187 yr by Sensei