paper: 987 Kinect Implementation

[JesseK]

Originally Posted by Hjelstrom

We put a surprising amount of work into just coming up with a way to safely and quickly shut the pandaboard down.

If you ever go into an IT-related industry or work on large multi-system software projects, graceful shutdown procedures will become a norm. At work we can get some nice graceful startup/shutdown times, but it takes many hours of tweaking.

As for using RAMDISK, that's not as straightforward as one might think. For one, most default Linux installs take 1Gb-2GB of total disk space, which would then be put into RAM (unsure of this Ubuntu image though). Then, any changes that are made to the O/S or program settings would have to be re-compressed and re-deployed as the O/S image for RAMDISK to open up at runtime. Usually the data directories (such as /home) and in this case FRC-related application directories (such as /opt) are NFS (network file system) mounted and are actually located on another computer -- yet I wouldn't recommend it for a live FRC field environment. Ergo, the data directories would then have to go somewhere -- presumably still on the SD card that's potentially causing the root issue anyways.

Interestingly, this type of platform (real-time processing on a dynamic system that has weight/space/power constraints) is perfect for a Net-booted disk-less architecture (assuming you're running with enough memory). It's even better when one considers scaling up to over 30,000 individual sensors. Unfortunately, the network has to be very, very (maybe even another very...) reliable for it to work.