I'd go with Steve's suggestion. The dual core 330 Intel boards are pretty much impossible to beat for performance/$. At the moment I have three of them. You can buy DC to DC power supplies that will maintain regulation through an engine cranking cycle - Minibox sells them also. And the cost is reasonable. Laptops are a crapshoot at best.
The Minibox M350 boxes are nice and cheap. I'd consider step and direction output to a servo drive if all you want to do is steer. Link in a GPS via a Python program. I think you might be able grab some GPS interface code from one of the Marine Chart Plotter open source programs. The oftentimes use an NMEA? interface protocol. I think you probably need to worry more about how to power the servo drive than how to power the PC. Sounds like fun. Dave Stephen Wille Padnos wrote: > Jon Elson wrote: > > >> Jack wrote: >> >> >> >>> For a sim only version, I even saw on phlatforum.com a guy posted >>> instructions >>> on running the emc2 CD on VMWare on a windows machine. It whines about >>> not doing the RT correctly, but it works OK for simulation. >>> >>> If we could find an inexpensive small board that is bullet proof enough for >>> shop use, that could be a real boon to the spread of EMC2 and low cost >>> CNC work. >>> >>> >>> >>> >> I am hoping the Beagle board will be that, and am working toward that >> end. The only >> real roadblock is RTAI, and the ARM maintainer for RTAI is working on it. >> >> >> > Considering that a D945GCLF2 motherboard is $80, 2GB memory is $40, a > hard drive is $50, and a DC-DC power supply is $50 (you could of course > get a full ATX case with power supply for less), I'm not sure where the > beagleboard really helps. It's definitely smaller. It's somewhat less > expensive (though I'm not sure how far below $220 you're going to get, > once you add a power supply, I/O conditioning, etc), it takes somewhat > less power (3W vs. 26W). > > For the small differences in cost, size, and power, you end up with a > full PC with gigabit network, 1.6GHz dual-core CPU, reasonable 3D > graphics, excellent latency numbers (maybe 8000 or so IIRC), and a PCI slot. > > Of course there's always a bit of pride to be taken in doing more with > less, I'm not sure there's really a great payoff here. > > - Steve > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Return on Information: > Google Enterprise Search pays you back > Get the facts. > http://p.sf.net/sfu/google-dev2dev > _______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Return on Information: Google Enterprise Search pays you back Get the facts. http://p.sf.net/sfu/google-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
