Rugged, Reliable, Low Power Linux Hardware?

Jesper asks: "OK, so I'm about to spend two years on a sailboat. The GUIs of all commercially available instrumentation electronics are ugly and outdated at best. But to develop my own I need a Linux based system that runs on 12V, uses very little power (preferably &lt 25W including monitor), has a sunlight readable waterproof SVGA display with min 16 colors and a waterproof input device (mouse, trackball or touchscreen. Keyboard not needed), and a rugged CPU with minimum footprint, preferably with a solid state harddrive. All this is perfectly possible to build, but I want to spend my energy developing the GUI, not building the hardware. I'm looking for tips on available H/W products."

Re:Why get that complex?

[tzanger]

Palm Pilot + GPS = most of what you want.

And uClinux [uclinux.org] runs on unmodified Palm hardware. The screen isn't colour and isn't QVGA but the processor in the Palm can do mono QVGA. Almost there. :-) I'm not 100% certain if uClinux will work with the processor in the IIIc or not; I think it will.

So depending on what you're trying to do you might be able to get away with a Palm or a Palm running uClinux (if you needed the Linux part). As far as x86 rugged hardware -- you could look to industrial electronics providers for that kind of thing. I know you can buy NEMA 4 laptops (they're expensive as hell but completely outdoor rated). If you don't need to go quite that far there is everything inbetween.

Look at purpose built marine computers.

[Bryan Andersen]

Have you looked at purpose built computers for the marine market? They have to have come along way sense I last looked at them in the late 80's. Also as others have said, look at industrial. Many fine systems, many portable and battery operated. Also look at what has been designed for inventory control. Some of them are waterproof.

I'm a similar boat, but I have a different end use. I'm looking to build an instument that will be a remotely situated net appliance. It also needs to be waterproof, cold proof, low-power, but dosen't need a user interface. There are many low power computer solutions out there. It all depends on what you are willing to pay and how much assembly you wish to do.

A system I'm looking at (DIMM-PC from JUMPtec) needs case, keyboard/mouse, and display to be provided by the integrator (me). It is very low power, has a LCD interface for driving a LDC display, has onboard FLASH disk (32MBytes), and is expandable. The reason I'm looking at it is it uses 2 watts for it's core, and with all expected parts added in I'll be under 5 watts total. You would want to add in a LCD, but I can see it staying under 10 watts total.

Re:Get a Laptop, Dude

[Bryan Andersen]

Actually I'd recomend getting a few laptops. One main one and some spares. Place the spares in a waterproof box and only pull them out when needed. For the main one, have a water proof box for it to live in when not in use.

Seeing that it will be subjected to a marine environment I sugest going through each laptop and conformal coating all the circuit boards.

Re:Why get that complex?

[ptomblin]

For sailing you need, what, speed and heading? GPS gives both.

I was watching the America's Cup races, and those boats have a lot more sensors and displays than just that. They seem to integrate position, ground speed and direction (from the GPS), wind speed and direction (from an anemometer and wind vane) and water speed (from sensors in the hull) in order to give you the speed and direction of the winds and the currents in order to help you plot a more efficient course.

As you already mentioned, depth soundings would probably be in there as well. Ideally you'd probably also want to recieve broadcast weather charts and forecasts as well - not much point making good speed towards your destination if there is a white squall between you and it.

Re:Get a Laptop, Dude

[Detritus]

I've read that conformal coating can cause thermal problems if it wasn't taken into account when the circuit board was designed.

Get a Laptop, Dude

[InitZero]

There are dozens of industrial laptops on the market that are waterproof (as much as anything with excited electrons is waterproof) and rugged. All of them will run on 12 volts. Power consumption would be less than 25 watts if you don't buy the latest and greatest model.

InitZero

some comments from experience

[wa1hco]

to qualify...I used to develop aircraft cockpit displays and used linux and OpenGL for some of them...

Color LCD's have very little reflective properties so need a backlight. In addition, a color LCD has only a few percent transmissivity. To get enough brightness to see the display in sunlight (10000 ft candles), requires extraordinary brightness and power in the backlight. Some of the "sunlight readable" display put antireflective coatings and contrast enhancing filters in front of the LCD's. That works by making the display very dark so that the weak light coming through becomes a bit visible gainst the dark background. This doesn't work very well because the user's eyes have to switch between looking at the horizon with 90% reflectivity and the display with 5% reflectivity... very fatiguing to use the image is dark on deep black.

A backlit monochrome display will have about 25% transmissivity, but still not enough to make for a low power backlight.

You really want a reflective display...like the Palm Pilot's but they have limited viewabilty, require a backlight for twighlight and night operation.

Think about the ATM's you've seen in sunlight, do you like any of them? If good technology existed for this, people would use it.

For a rugged processor, we're using the RPX series from Embedded Planet. Runs on 5V, works over a wide temperature range (-60 to +100C in our tests) and supported by Hard Hat Linux from MontaVista (powerPC based). EP has a variation with a display.

Re:Why get that complex?

[lizrd]

Well, it all depends on what you need to connect. If you only need to connect one insturment the palm might do, Although the screen might be a little constricting. The company [intermec.com] I work for makes some handheld, ruggedized, handheld PC class machines. These were ment mostly for a factory/warehouse environment, but might be suitable for you. In particular I might recommend our 6110 [intermec.com] model. Which has a 1/4 VGA screen and a 486 processor. It comes with a MS OS installed, but some of the guys here in the software development area have gotten them to run Linux (Slack 6 I think). It has several serial ports avaliable, both internal and external, and 2 free PCMCIA slots.
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reliability

[arete]

I'm sorry I can't be more help than I'm about to be, but here goes:

You will first need to decide what kind of reliability you really want. If I was going to be on a boat for 2 yrs, I'd spring for very reliable. Although it depends on how bad-off you'd be if it horked.

Search for Single Board Computer, and you should be able to find some that can withstand 25+ Gs and probably are waterproof to boot. Then make sure the OS and all essential functions run with no drive at all, from SRAM or FlashROM or something similar.

To me, I'd want something that would keep getting jolted around during a hurricane and still work. On the other hand, they use Thinkpads on the Shuttle *shrug*.

You can try to have it export to a drive ALSO, if you want, but I'd say only for recording and non-constant functions. 3 laptop drives might be cheaper than 1 solid state, and are probably as reliable, if swapping them is okay.

If you want some particular, but inexperienced, advice reply and I'll mail you.

Why get that complex?

[scotpurl]

Palm Pilot + GPS = most of what you want. Get a waterproofing kit for your Palm at http://www.aquapac.net/homeframe.html. You can buy AAA size batteries anywhere in the world, or even recharge them quickly off of a solar cell charger.

Write a hack that keeps your Palm on all the time, and instead draw power directly from something other than AAA's, like one of those rugged marine-duty batteries.

For sailing you need, what, speed and heading? GPS gives both. Or buy a magnetic compass (http://www.precisionnavigation.com/palmnavigator3 rd.html) for your Palm as well. Bet you could write an interface to your depth gauge via the serial input.