[ebarker]

An aside - I work for a company that does a lot of embedded work and there is a surprising amount of work and COST that goes into packaging a product so that it is usable in the field without a lot of fuss and mess. It is stunning how much cost goes into connectors.

For our application:

Connecting straight into the box without a lot of adapters, daughter boards, etc is an advantage. Imagine using a cRio without breakout boards and sidecars.

Our robot isn't easily accessible. We can jump over a long haul radio IP network into a linux box, maintain the code that is running the robot, plus put in other software processes that do other things for us. We need a real operating system.

The way we do it right now is we have an embedded linux box connected to a digilent controller that manages robot signals. Now we can collapse those two assemblies into a single integrated assembly.