Wireless Embedded monitoring

[Daniel Eischen]

On Fri, 26 Sep 2003, Wes Peters wrote:

> On Tuesday 23 September 2003 15:55, Daniel Eischen wrote:
> > On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, M. Warner Losh wrote:
> > > In message:
> > > <Pine.GSO.4.10.10309231430260.28875-100000 at pcnet5.pcnet.com>
> > >
> > >             Daniel Eischen <eischen at vigrid.com> writes:
> > > : Anyone have any experience with PC/104 or other really small
> > > : footprint platorms and FreeBSD?
> > >
> > > Yes.  Works great.  We've used FreeBSD on about two dozen different
> > > single board computers.
> > >
> > > : We need to build a small box for equipment monitoring
> > > : (temperature, pressure diff., vibration, indication).  Just a few
> > > : discrete inputs/outputs, and analog inputs would be good enough. 
> > > : The hard part may be sampling an A/D signal at up to 30KHz, so
> > > : having the I/O card do the sampling and buffer it would
> > > : probably be necessary.
> > >
> > > I'd recommend one of the Soekris boxes.
> > >
> > > : Any ideas on hardware (SBC, I/O board)?
> > >
> > > http://www.soekris.com is great.
> >
> > Yes, it looks nice.  The form factor is just a bit
> > larger than PC/104, especially with a PCCard plugged
> > into its side.  We'd also need some sort of general
> > purpose I/O card which are fairly easy to find in
> > PC/104 stacking modules.
> 
> I'll join in the general chorus here.  I had one of the very early 
> soekris boxes and found it to be a gem.  If a 5x86 133MHz processor 
> meets your needs, you'll like it a lot.  I haven't tried the net4801 
> board, but I've worked with other Geode designs and if you need more 
> cpu, that'll probably do.  Good luck.

If they only made smaller PC/104 sized boards...  We're
trying to make our own system that doesn't end up being
any larger than a competitor's system.  Their system
is housed in a metal box about 4"(W) x 2"(H) x 6.5"(L).
They are using embedded Linux on an ARM processor with
a DSP (SHARC ?) to handle the I/O.

I was pointed at Advantech:

  http://www.advantech.com/products/Model.asp?Category_ID=1-D6LKE&bu=

and have found similar PC/104 equipment at a few other
vendors.  Without doing much research (we usually build
much larger VME based systems), there seems to be a lot
of options in PC/104 modules.

-- 
Dan Eischen