Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

PC/104 Consortium Launches 2nd Annual Contest

Posted by timothy on from the embeddably-cute dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The PC/104 Consortium is holding a second annual PC/104 Design Contest. The contest will recognize embedded engineers who are designing innovative products based on the group's PC/104 and PC/104-Plus standards for small form-factor modular embedded computers, and winners in three categories will be flown to San Francisco to receive their awards at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco."

11 comments

  1. How... underwhelming. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1
    inners in three categories will be flown to San Francisco to receive their awards at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco.

    Considering that PC/104 is super-expensive, you think they'd at least consider some decent prize like say oh... a PC/104 system. I'd much rather have another PC/104 than a trip to meet a bunch of cheap bastards.

  2. Funny, I was thinking the same thing... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Saw the headline, and thought this might be a decent way to fund some projects I've had in my head since I first discovered the PC-104 platform... but since I still can't even afford a testbed, there's even less point...

  3. last year's winners by Fat+Cow · · Score: 1

    last year's winners

    --
    stay frosty and alert
  4. it'd be really fun to enter by LordMyren · · Score: 1

    but pc/104 is way way way too expensive for what it represents. i'll pay 1/4 as much for a non-modular non-standard interface that i have to spend a couple days fscking with the boot loader for and have to recompile for, thanks much.

    i can see the appeal in pc/104, but its really hideously overpriced considering the actual manufacturing costs. given how many jumps behind modern pc's it is, it cant be all that hard to design either.

    thankfully the new pico/micro/nano and whatnot boards look like they'll start providing alternatives. we just need better standards for low form addon cards (pci) before these rip offs finally bite the bullet they've had coming.

    1. Re:it'd be really fun to enter by Voivod · · Score: 1
      we just need better standards for low form addon cards (pci) before these rip offs finally bite the bullet they've had coming.

      Something to keep in mind is that PC/104 products are often designed and tested to go from -40C to +80C without a fan, deal with factors like radiation and humidity, and have much longer expected lifetimes than "equivalent" products in the consumer PC market. Your cheap VIA Nano-ITX board will blow up when subjected to the conditions PC/104 was designed for, i.e. space, vehicles, aircraft, outdoors, bottom of the sea, etc.

      Having said that, PC/104 is like most of the rest of the niches in the embedded industry... the profit margins would make Dell weep, but Dell sells more in a day than that vendor will sell in a year. The customer base is very small, and that has nothing to do with the prices. Disclosure: I work in the PC/104 industry :-)

      P.S. I agree with another poster that the reward for the contest sucks, and I was totally disappointed in the winner last year. Yay! Glue! Way to inspire the Next Generation to learn about PC/104 folks! Every week I talk to people building way cooler stuff than this... using electrical signals passed along rails in a subway system to implement an open network for subway control... scanning shipping containers for WMD... satelites watching earth's magnetic field to predict earthquakes...
    2. Re:it'd be really fun to enter by Helmholtz+Coil · · Score: 1
      I agree, that's why I try to use PC/104 for my projects at work. The temperature range is great, but what usually sells it for me in harsh environments is the shock and vibration tolerance.

      I think the best thing about PC/104 is the "vendor depth," i.e. how many companies are out there with PC/104 products. If I need a data acquisition card, or a UPS, or an ARINC-429 communications card (for avionics), I can Google and find somebody that sells them. That way I can concentrate on the software and the whole system, not in trying to cobble together the hardware.

      I've had pretty good luck with EMAC in terms of getting a good price on PC/104 SBC's. Big fan of the NS Geode 300 MHz SBC's-they work great. Now if I could just find a cheap high-speed PC/104 DAQ card (2+ channels simultaneous sampling, at least 1 MSa/s per channel) I'd be happy. :-)
  5. Check out www.abiatech.com for affordable PC/104. by highfreq2 · · Score: 1

    AbiaTech has good prices on PC/104 computers, and I've found there stuff to be good quality. The FB2510 is a 300MHz Geode(decendent of the Cyrix line) system with built in ethernet and VGA/LCD video. It has roughly the performance of a 300MHz Pentium. It doesn't need a fan, which is a big bonus. The price on single units for the FB2510 was $280 about a year ago. The website's price-list is a broken link so you'll have to call to get the current price.

  6. Using them in the DARPA Grand Challenge by Animats · · Score: 1
    We're using three PC/104 systems in our entry in the DARPA Grand Challenge. We did this for ruggedization and temperature range reasons.

    We're using Ampro CoreModule 400 boards. These deliver about 20 MIPS, even though they clock at 133MHz. Basically, they're 486 machines. But they work fine. We have 256MB flash cards in each machine as the "disk". We may upgrade to CoreModule 600 boards when Ampro starts shipping them in about a month if it turns out we run out of CPU power closing the control loops.

    PC/104 is just ISA bus in a more compact form factor. This is rather retro for 2003. There's "PC/104+", which is a PCI bus, but cramming in the additional connector creates packaging problems. The connector technology is just ordinary header connectors, unlike Eurocard/VME/Compact PCI, which use a much better connector but result in a bigger card cage. Assembling a PC/104 stack without bending pins is hard. But once you get the whole stack bolted together and into the rubber shock mounts in the solid metal case, it's quite rugged.

    We run QNX on all the vehicle machines. (There are two larger Pentium 4 machines in back; the PC/104 machines do low-level control.) We can bring up the full QNX GUI and even do web surfing, but at 20 MIPS, it's rather sluggish.