Quote:
|
Originally Posted by sciguy125
I realize that if your looking for vibration resistant media, flash would be your best bet. However, I'm a little weary about using flash as the primary storage on a computer. My concern is wearing out the cells. Flash can only go through a finite number of read/write cycles. For something like a camera, it's fine because you'll usually fill up the card before erasing it. A computer however, will be constantly changing data. A file that's rewritten very often (maybe a log), it would wear out the flash very quickly.
|
I've been trying to stay away from flash media because of the read/write limitations and the fact that while the computer is not driving the lawn mower it would make a decent desktop PC. But since I have not really started the software development yet, I can design to minimize reads and writes, which should be farely few anyways.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by ConKbot of Doom
Do you really need a full computer? Or a full computer on the mower? what do you want to do with the mower and the program? Could you get away with something like a microcontroller? If that wouldnt be enough, you could take a linksys WRT 54G wireless router, which runs on linux and has many other 3rd party firmwares, and is open-source also. Add a SD card, and use the GPIO's on it to interface to the mower. http://kiel.kool.dk/
Plus then you have wifi built into it, and you could do neat stuff like call the mower in if the weather turns bad... etc..
EDIT: just to get you thinking... http://yasha.okshtein.net/wrt54g/ |
Well the main reason for a full sized PC is that I wanted to beable to have remote control over the internet with streaming video and a MicroATX PC seemed like a good control system. I looked into using a microcontroller but it just seemed more advantagous to build PC for ~$300 that does what I want and more than settle for a ucontroller that did most of what I want for 1/3 -1/2 the cost of the PC. Also, with a PC I can keep adding sensors and do all kinds of image processing until my heart is content. May not have been the best choice but thats what I've got. Wow that Linksys RC car is pretty sweet... now that would be awesome on a Nitro RC car!
As I look at the prices of flash media,
laptop harddrives are starting to look very attractive. I found the
specifications for a laptop harddrive and I don't think my lawn mower will approach the maximum shock or vibration rating but I need to be sure, any ideas on how to measure it?
