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PC/104 Consortium Launches 2nd Annual Contest
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."
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first post
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.
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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...
last year's winners
stay frosty and alert
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.
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.
...PC contest launches you!
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.