Posted by Justin Wilson on October 21, 2009 at 12:59pm
Hi team,I have finally decided to get off my backside and start the long and slippery path to despair and bankruptcy, an Intel Atom powered autopilot. Why you ask....for a giggle and to see if it will ever get off the ground and the simple fact it gets cold in Eingglund so 1.6Ghz of silicon heating will keep the insides warm!The project so far consists of an PicoItx motherboard 1.6 Ghz Atom with 2 gig of ram and an 8gig CF hard drive running Windoz Embedded 2009 (cutdown XP). The board has 4 USB ports, 2 Serial ports and some other goodies running at 5V with just a heatsink for cooling (not in photo).As it stands the board / ua does the following:Webcam steaming 640x480 Divx to the GCS via WiFiGPS streaming to the GCS3 Axis accel streaming x,y,z to GCS (will be replacing with IMU)16 servo USB boardGCS so far:Displays streaming videoDisplays GPS data with graphical dials etcReal time moving maps from gps data – Can select Google maps,Google terrain, Google sat, Bing maps, Yahoo maps etc etc maps get cached locally in Database so works offline.Joystick control sends servo commands to UA and moves themVery much a work in progress, will probably never fly, but is keeping the grey matter from rotting away.CheersJustin
I'm automated a great deal around my house with Arduino trying to get used to it (my curtain controller stepper motor broke this morning :() and in doing so have bought far too many Pro Minis. So I've designed a PCI card with an ATMega 2560 on it and all the leads on the backplate. I've got 3 UARTs spare, 40 IOs, 12 PWM, 16 analogue ins and a direct FTDI into the computer.
It's not particularly hard to take the 2560 reference design and make it fit a PCI board although the PCI custom part is slightly annoying. I'm waiting on its arrival to get my server hooked up and take over everything in the house :D
Also you may want to consider doing sensor boards instead of just sensors. That way calibration is done by the board and the output is exactly as you wish so your Atom only has to interpret lightening its load.
Replies
I'm automated a great deal around my house with Arduino trying to get used to it (my curtain controller stepper motor broke this morning :() and in doing so have bought far too many Pro Minis. So I've designed a PCI card with an ATMega 2560 on it and all the leads on the backplate. I've got 3 UARTs spare, 40 IOs, 12 PWM, 16 analogue ins and a direct FTDI into the computer.
It's not particularly hard to take the 2560 reference design and make it fit a PCI board although the PCI custom part is slightly annoying. I'm waiting on its arrival to get my server hooked up and take over everything in the house :D
Also you may want to consider doing sensor boards instead of just sensors. That way calibration is done by the board and the output is exactly as you wish so your Atom only has to interpret lightening its load.