I am looking a low power (less than 5watt), small embedded Linux board to be carried on a model airplane.
Linux box must have * Flash Disk (64-128MB) * 128-256MB memory * at least 3 serial ports (RS232) * a parallel printer port (to be used as digital I/O) * a wireless LAN (optional)
The TS-7200 is kind of fun. Though not exactly meeting your criterion, it could be a fun device for you to get into your project specification. It has 2 serial ports but can support USB serial ports. We are currently "playing with this". Find it at
It is a rather neat board, I caught myself marveling at its capabilites then I remembered that I used to work at a company that 12 years ago ran a plant running 100 remote monitoring devices and handled 10 or more individual users on a wickedly fast (at the time) 386 compaq running at
33Mhz I think. Granted we had a 320 Megabyte hard drive, significantly larger than the one the 256CF card the development system on this board uses, but then we only had 3Meg of RAM in this thing , not 32Megabytes. Of course the serial ports were handled by dedicated serial concentrators, which significantly offloaded that work for the processor. Anyways, its a nice platform for development work. The
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product is interesting too (from another poster), only it doesn't appear to have a direct I/O capabilities, and it doens't have an Ethernet port. It is a lot more powerful. T.
I work at Technologic Systems and am an engineer on the TS-7200 embedded ARM SBC. I'm pretty sure the board will meet the original posters requirements except maybe RAM.
Low power
The board has a 10/100 ethernet port, but if you're not using it, its around 2.5 watts running the CPU at 166 Mhz, with ethernet, its around
3.2 watts You can slow down the CPU to conserve even more power if you don't need all 166 Mhz.
Flash Disk (64-128MB)
I've used up to 1 Gb compact flash cards successfully on the TS-7200. Linux itself boots from onboard flash to login prompt in about 8-12 seconds.
128-256MB memory
We could probably build a custom board with this amount of memory, but we'd have to use multiple 64 Mb SDRAM chips which in todays market are still quite expensive.
at least 3 serial ports (RS232)
TS-7200 comes with 2 onboard serial ports, but you can stack TS-SER1 (+1 port) and TS-SER4 (+4 ports) daughtercards and have up 12 extra serial ports.
a parallel printer port (to be used as digital I/O)
TS-7200 has 20 general purpose I/O pins (no printer port though)
a wireless LAN (optional)
Theoretically, you could attach a Linux supported USB wifi or bluetooth.
Not sure about similar boards to ours in the UK, but we definitely ship there. We use UPS and Fedex, which I understand can be pricy for just a single unit. I'm pretty sure we can use DHL too which I hear is cheaper if you specifically ask for it. Per-unit pricing and shipping gets much more economical in larger quantity orders.
Nano-ITX (or even mini-ITX) might work too, but I would guess would use much more than 5 watts and be much more expensive and complicated to "embed" (you'd need extra periphery for flash disk, serial console, RAM dimms, CPU, power supply)
I'd like to put in my recommendation for the TS-7200 as well. I received mine last week and it looks to be very good value for what it is.
If, like me, you're not up on Linux then it's a little daunting at first - especially as there was a misprint in the docs relating to booting into the CF development image. It should be:
Press CTRL+C from the terminal on power up to get to Redboot prompt. type: fis load vmlinux (Not zimage as in docs) type: exec -c "console=ttyAM0,115200 root=/dev/hda1"
Anyway, a very nice board, and the enclosure is also well worth the money.
All that's missing is a good message board relating to it - possibly a Yahoo eGroup....
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