fungus:
mrburnette:
But to answer the original question, I do not see why you could not offload to a math coprocessor.... surely would run up the co$t for a single-percision FP solution.There's a double precision version of the chip. That would give whole new capabilities to the Arduino (double precision math isn't supported by the Arduino libc).
Yes. You are correct.
You bring up an interesting scenario. My idea of doing this little project was to move memory hungry FP library routines to a separate chip and to implement a simple scientific calculator that was software-extensible to allow new functions to be easily created. This bloat in calculations and libraries would not be "seen" by the main uC since a standard interface was being used (serial, I2C, etc.) and the code on the hosting uC need not be overly complex to pass intermediate data to the off-load chip and receive the results in calculations. However, if a 3rd chip (dedicated math coprocessor) was added to the mix, the primary uC would still not "know" anything about it... only the 2nd Arduino chip would be more complex in code and would manage handling the double-precision handoff. This makes for an expensive and somewhat more complex interface, but does certainly warrant consideration in some cases.
Rather, I am hopeful that a compatible 64-bit FP library can be found and integrated into the Arduino coprocessor. This would be the minimum cost, minimum complexity for the primary uC.
Ray