I am looking for some suggestions on a hardware platform that I need for prototyping. The requirements are:
- First and foremost, needs to be easy to develop software for. IE: it should be free to develop software, be easy to download code to, not require tons of setup time...
- Hardware wise, it needs to support 2 serial ports preferably, some sort of flash storage, and some sort of input mechanism on the hardware itself
- Does not need to be graphics based, the software I need to write can be pure text
- Flash memory greater than 8MB
- A way to get files written to flash off to an external PC
- Battery powered
- Does not need to be terribly fast.. logging short strings at 100Hz max.
- Preferably easy to obtain used, so it's cheap... but not a must.
- Linux supported is always a plus, but not a must again.
This will be used as a prototype for a datalogging application. I would need to write a program that listens on both serial ports, and simply datalogs the serial text to files in flash memory. The input method (touch screen, keypad, etc..) would be used to start/stop logging by interacting with the program. Once datalogging is done, the files would be transferred to an external PC.
I am guessing some sort of cell phone or PDA, but there are so many that I was hoping to get suggestions on some commonly used ones. I currently have the prototype system using a laptop as the datalogger, but it's time to shrink it down so the system is a little more mobile.
Ideas?