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I'm thinking about a project with RPI. I need 4 or 6 analog inputs with sample rate between 500 and 1000 samples per second and 2 or 4 digital output as response of processing the input signals. Between 100 and 300 responses per second.

I reviewed this board , but I'm not sure if RPI achieves real time processing. My questions are?

  1. RPI needs a RT kernel?
  2. Is it necessary an independent board (maybe this arduino?) with RT adc to send the sampled values with a certain sample rate to RPI?
  3. Or 1 and 2 together.

Thanks.

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I'd go for idea 2, using an Arduino for the ADC and something fast on the Pi (maybe C if you don't mind getting your hands dirty) to do the processing, and communicate between the two using serial (there are a few blog posts/instructables on how to hook up an Arduino to a Pi via serial). IIRC it's just enabling some options in the boot.txt on the Pi and getting baud rate right on both of them.

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  • Serial data is buffered and you won't have to worry about time constraints on the pi side -- the buffer is 64 KB and it is capable of much faster transfers than the Arduino's 115 Kbaud which is 14.4 KB/s of data. That's probably the bottleneck as I am pretty sure it will be able to sample faster than that (it's not clear to me here how many bits a sample would be).
    – goldilocks ♦
    Sep 1, 2016 at 14:35
  • @goldilocks wasn't aware of it being buffered, thanks. As for C as a choice I wasn't sure if the processing would be a bottleneck in python, as a lot of DSP applications use C for speed of processing
    – Luke Moll
    Sep 1, 2016 at 14:37
  • I guess it depends on what is being done with the data on the pi; simply reading it at that rate is a very light task but if there is a lot of processing then you might have to get worried about how fast it can be done using whatever methodology.
    – goldilocks ♦
    Sep 1, 2016 at 14:51

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