Thanks for replying. i’ll try to clarify my quandry.
Yes, I’m after a ethernet capable linux box with some general inputs. I have a budget up to $300. Can you recommend any products that are suitable?
The box needs to have dns, wget, and a way to trigger the wget command when an input changes state.
The reason I want to pipe the result to dev/null is that the linux box does not need to record the result. The action of downloading the url causes the ptz to move.
Nigel:
Yes, I’m after a ethernet capable linux box with some general inputs. I have a budget up to $300. Can you recommend any products that are suitable?
If you don’t mind voiding your warranty, this sounds like the kind of thing you could do with a WRT54G type router. I think they have 8 GPIO points you can get to. People have used those pins to bit-bang i2c or 1wire, so you could go that route if it falls short of the 8 pins you need.
You could probably make a gumstix/robostix computer to do the job in the $300 range with a lot less frustration.
I was going to use Soekris net4801 or the wrap but they both use the National Geode SC1100 CPU which is end of life (http://www.yawarra.com.au/catalogue.php)
Not all the soekris boards are based on the geode sc1100. The 4501 is based on the amd elan. the imminent 5501 is based on the geode lx. From the sounds of it, you probably don’t need much horsepower.
What about some of the mini-ITX boards based on the VIA eden chipset? For example the fanless via EPIA 5000 goes for about $110. Use a USB thumb drive for boot and storage. adding 256MB of RAM is less than $50 and a small case + power supply should keep you within budget. You could use the line printer port for inputs.
It’s an ARM based single board computer with ethernet and 20 digital IOs. Unit price is $129. I’m using one for a home automation controller and web server.
They also have a few other systems with various features that might be worth looking at.
pretty cool. looks like it was announced yesterday. at $70, I could see using this for a whole bunch networked devices. I’ll have to get one. Does anyone know who actually carries them? digikey doesn’t seem to. I didn’t see a store on the atmel site.
There’s also the [NeCore12, which is a MC9S12NE microcontroller based board. Can’t run Linux, which means that writing your application might be more of a pain (you’ll have to deal with its tiny TCP/IP implementation), but it small and fairly cheap.](Technological Arts – Technological Arts LLC)
Philba:
pretty cool. looks like it was announced yesterday. at $70, I could see using this for a whole bunch networked devices. I’ll have to get one. Does anyone know who actually carries them? digikey doesn’t seem to. I didn’t see a store on the atmel site.
Patience, young grasshopper. Expect to see stock within 1-2 weeks.
Philba:
oh, so that’s what “immediate availability” means, oh wise one.
Immediately available to distributors.
The consumer electronics supply chain works just a tad differently than the electronic component supply chain. I don’t see why so many people can’t seem to grasp this concept. It should be intuitively obvious to even the most casual of observers. In consumer electronics, companies will announce product availability after they’ve shipped the products to stores. With electrical components (or dev boards for such components), manufacturers announce availability and ship parts when orders come in from distributors.
bullsh*t. no disti even had information about that device until a week later. I know how the disti world works. Digikey has it down for april 13 availability. You can’t tell me it takes 3 weeks from true product availability to them shipping the product to end users. The first units will get to digikey on april 12. Semiconductor houses notify distis well ahead of the general announcement and work hard to have part availability at announce if they say “available immediately”. So, it should have been in digikey’s database on day one.
I worked for 8+ years at intel. If customers were calling about product and it was not available - especially proto or development tools - it was a very big deal. Samples are similar. It’s about design wins - that’s how you win in that business. No dev tool, no design win. If you say available, it should be available. Now lots of companies pre-announce availability but they don’t say “immediately available”. They say “available in Q3” or what ever. You never commit to a specific date unless you know for sure. Customers remember this sort of thing. Apparently Atmel is going through some internal upheavals so it not suprising that there isn’t great execution going on. I certainly hope this isn’t symptomatic of a fatal disease.
Philba:
bullsh*t. no disti even had information about that device until a week later. I know how the disti world works. Digikey has it down for april 13 availability. You can’t tell me it takes 3 weeks from true product availability to them shipping the product to end users. The first units will get to digikey on april 12. Semiconductor houses notify distis well ahead of the general announcement and work hard to have part availability at announce if they say “available immediately”. So, it should have been in digikey’s database on day one.
I worked for 8+ years at intel. If customers were calling about product and it was not available - especially proto or development tools - it was a very big deal. Samples are similar. It’s about design wins - that’s how you win in that business. No dev tool, no design win. If you say available, it should be available. Now lots of companies pre-announce availability but they don’t say “immediately available”. They say “available in Q3” or what ever. You never commit to a specific date unless you know for sure. Customers remember this sort of thing. Apparently Atmel is going through some internal upheavals so it not suprising that there isn’t great execution going on. I certainly hope this isn’t symptomatic of a fatal disease.
You should realize that some people already have production boards in their hands. I guess that's just a fluke, right? Or maybe, just maybe, some customers are more valued than others. People that buy through Digi-Key (instead of getting the boards from reps, FAEs, etc.) are (in my opinion, but it is only common sense) more likely to use lots of these parts.
But I see no point in further discussing this. Think what you like. But the fact is that some of these have already been shipped out to people.