PC/104 Embedded Consortium Design Winners

An anonymous reader writes "The PC/104 Embedded Consortium announced the winners of its first PC/104 Design Contest, at the Embedded Systems Conference today in San Francisco. The awards recognize engineers designing innovative systems and devices based on the consortium's PC/104 and PC/104-Plus standards. Winners were announced in three categories: Commercial for industrial/medical/transportation/other; Commercial for military/aerospace/COTS; and Research Project. Read the full story at Linuxdevices.com. Lots of images!"

Comments

Some Good Info on PC/104

[Michael's a Jerk!]

can be found Here Promises to be an interesting standard.

PC 104 in a nutshell

[Silicon_Knight]

PC 104 is basically a form factor, just like ATX, mini-ATX, mini-ITX, etc. It is one of the smallest form factor out there, largely used in industrial automation setup.

The one characteristic that makes PC104 interesting is the "pass through" bus connector. Consisting of 104 pins (hence it's name), you stack modules of extension card on the base board, and build vertically your components. See link:

PC104 FAQ with pictures

They tend to be pretty low power consumption, and there are a mind boggling array of PC104 modules out there, from radio modems to GPS receivers to servo controllers and 3 axis accelerometers. For hobby use, I wouldn't really go with them, since they are more expensive than the much cheaper mini-itx boards (which is what I will be using for my next car computer).

Mini-ITX info link

Man, reading through the projects - they outfitted a 1997 Corvette with a "fly by wire" steering. My god, I wish my research lab has the amount of cash handy to buy a corvette for a ressearch project...

-=- Terence

No love for PC/104

[SuperQ]

I've never had any kind of interest in PC/104.. it's an old standard, the PC/104 pass-through bus is ISA based. Every time I try and find out prices, it's been $400-500 for a devel board, no one seems to think about selling them in small quantities. You only get a 33mhz 486 for that $400 board..

I have recently come to enjoy working with Soekris boards.. http://www.soekris.com

The guy does things right.. Compact flash slots on board for OS, no over-priced Disk-On-Chip stuff. PCI or mini-pci slots, 133mhz AMD Elan chips, PCMCIA slots on some models.. serial port and simple network bootable flash. and 2-3 PCI 10/100 ethernet chips.. a similar PC/104 board would be stacked 4cm tall with adapter boards, all stuck on a ISA bus.

Re:No love for PC/104

[apharov]

No wonder you have no love for PC/104 if you're so prejudiced that you don't even bother reading the specs of PC/104+, which has a PCI bus.

For example the system you are talking about can be achieved using only 2 PC/104 boards (+1 board for power), with standard 2,5" HDD if you don't like SSDs. I know because I was just testing such a system yesterday, and you'll find the boards too by browsing the web a bit. And oh wait, you'll also get an 300Mhz processor with that system.

Re:WOW

[homer_ca]

"Top research prize went to a steer by wire system. This is already employed in race cars and ferrari's alike."

Not exactly. Many cars have a drive-by-wire throttle, even relatively inexpensive cars like Nissan Maximas. All steering is still done by a direct mechanical linkage. There have been a few experimental research and concept cars with drive-by-wire steering.

Good Stuff.

[ZenShadow]

A while ago I got the bug to design an MP3 player for my car, and needed some embedded hardware for it (unfortunately this happened right before I moved back accross the US, and I lost interest after that, what with work an' all). I ended up picking up a buscuit PC board from www.advantech.com. It was like $500 at the time, but had everything on it -- audio, ethernet, IDE, floppy, VGA, LCD, a bunch of serial ports, and a PC/104 port that I intended to use for a PCMCIA adapter (wireless support).

These things are cool. You could literally build one into a 5.25" disk enclosure, and it would fit perfectly (even uses the right power connector). If you want something that doesn't have the mess of an ATX power supply and slots that make the cards stick out, PC/104-based solutions are ideal -- it's a nice, clean stack.

Advantech also now manufactures a StrongARM-based solution, which I'm thinking about picking up for a revived version of the project. I think they've also got XScale-based boards.

--ZS

Re:But does it run Linux?

[Helmholtz Coil]

Yep, they sure do. I've got two PC/104 projects going right now, another two potentials, and they all depend on Linux.

Check out EMAC's page for more info on running Linux. You know with a name like that they must support Linux! ;)

It's a standard

[wiredog]

And industrial automation is a very conservative field. Conservative meaning "why use something new and untried when we have something old that is known to work?" Conservative meaning that MS-DOS was still being used into the late 90's for non-real time embedded apps. It may not have been stable, but it's faults, and how to avoid them, were well understood, making it a fairly robust OS.

Similarly, while PC/104 is not new, fast, or high powered, it is stable, robust, and everyone knows it.

Oh, and one of the reasons that 33mhz 486s are used is because they can handle hot environments without melting down. What would happen if you put an Athlon or P4 in an unventilated cabinet in a plating shop in Oklahoma in August? 100 degrees F on the outside of the cabinet.

Another reason for high cost of PC/104 is robustness. How well does the Soekris board handle vibration? Will the CF chip wiggle its way out of the slot? These are used in systems that have to have near-mainframe reliability. If the system crashes (sometimes literally, if it's an automated multiple-hoist line) due to a hardware failure, with a millionm dollars worth of product in the line, there will be a technician on an airplane that day. A stable, robust, PC/104 board is a hell of a lot cheaper than that!