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?
Your choice here is large, dozens of brands of Single Board Computer or microcontroller based development boards will do what you want.
The Rabbit Modules might be worth considering:
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e.g.:
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Has an SD card slot, FAT file system support, Ethernet for PC upload, and 6 serial ports.If you already have a system working on a PC then you might be best to consider a PC-104 Industrial PC based SBC. They are just a 386/486/ Pentium/whatever PC shrunk down to fit a small board and can be battery powered. Still overkill for just logging data though. But all your software PC tools work the same.
Dave.