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?
Try a beagleboard:
formatting link
Regards, Bob Monsen