[ale] Designing hardware that runs Linux

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Sun, 2010-10-31 at 21:49 -0400, Chris Fowler wrote:
> PC/104

Interesting, but it is both pricier than I imagined, and I don't
understand just quite what the heck it is.

Probably why I would want to talk with someone who does this stuff and
try to bounce the more detailed ideas that I have off of them.

FWIW, this board at [0] looks like it could potentially be useful for
what I am looking for, though it would require some modification to the
ideas that I have and wouldn't potentially be as expansion-friendly as I
would like.  It woudln't be bad if I have a means to provide something
akin to quality-of-service over the USB bus and could just break it out
into the various sorts of interconnections I need, since there is
theoretically 480 Mbps available bandwidth there (and as best as I can
tell for my initial setup I would not need any more than just over 300
Mbps); I could then just use adapters to communicate using USB as the
transit bus.  But I would then need to have a little bit extra external
hardware to perform some of the work of interfacing with an already
in-place system with existing hardware.

The sucky thing is that I am absolutely certain what I want in terms of
software on the thing.  But the physical requirements are seemingly
tough, and finding the right stuff for the job seems to be even harder.
Though, in thinking about it, if I did use the board at [0], that'd
probably make my life even a bit easier.  I could build and test the
software part on a standard computer, and do the testing with the add-on
hardware that would work over USB, and use the second USB port for
expansion to another module if necessary, with less of a limitation than
a 100 Mbps Ethernet "bus" for expansion.  Hrm.

I love technology!

	--- Mike

[0] http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Variscite-VARSOMAM35/