Thought you would find this interesting

[leccyflyer]

It's a story about a swarm of model aeroplanes with a purpose

http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS2142584362.html

[Arp]

Except apalling lack of USB host ports (for cameras)... I hereby retract all my previous skeptical comments about this "Gumstix" thingy.

I read more about them... and they ain't as bad as I first thought (I first learned about them when they were still forming a company, back in 2004).

They are making a various plugins for connecting them to various useful things -- including a ComplactFlash card.

I am henceforth seriously considerig Gumstix as a backup solution, in case other solutions should fail. Or actually... make it a *parallel solution*.

Damn me if I ain't going to support this company by buying one. (I just need to take a minute for careful consideration regardng which model and plugins I most need).

The very fact of them making such things... is highly commendable.

Now if I could only... figure out a way to somehow kludge in a camera. Those people from Essex did it somehow -- and I must figure out how.

[sesat]

They don't have SPI either, bummer.

[Arp]

Pardon for being ignorant of what exactly SPI is... but could its functionality be substituted for, by hooking something up to the I2C or NSSP bus?

Regarding cameras... I found out that currently, the Essex team appears to use offboard vision processing (basically wireless spycams transmitting their picture into a server).

However, it still ought be possible to equip this board with vision. In worst-case scenarios, a gumstix module equipped with Ethernet could access an Ethernet camera, or a module with WiFi could access a WiFi camera... but both are clumsy options (compared to tiny things like Creative Webcam Notebook, such cameras are really bulky), and would cancel out the benefit of having a tiny board.

Rumors also spread... regarding the feasibility of using a CompactFlash USB host adapter, which, if it had the correct drivers, might accept a camera.

[sesat]

SPI is a 4MHz serial bus for microcontrollers. I2C is 400kHz and is too slow to use as a rich sensor bus. Common high-sampling-rate or high-resolution ADC chips use SPI. NSSP is a much faster serial port but I don't know how to use it... after doing more reading it seems possible to operate in SPI like mode using the Linux NSSP driver but I'm stumped as to how, I can't find code examples.

See pxa-nssp.c


Ram

[Arp]

After checking available options... I have to admit that dropping in USB host support is unlikely to go smoothly.

During my brief market survey, I failed to discover any widely available (currently-on-market) CompactFlash USB adapters with known-good Linux drivers.

Have to investigate other options.