PC104 on a mini race car

> Some good news. I dropped by the lab where all the electrical parts are
> been worked on. The electrical engineer showed me some of his latest work.
> At the moment he is using xPC Target to run run the motors. A lot of the
> system has been designed in Matlab.

I have no experience with Matlab but I suspect there's a _big_ difference
between running it on a lab PC and an embedded Celeron.


> They've also purchased a 1GB CF card that inserts to the side of the PC104
> board. There is one problem with this. In order to make it bootable he made
> a floppy disk image onto the card and as a result the 1GB card now only
> reads 1.44MB.

This guy sounds like he knows enough to be dangerous, I don't know what's
involved but the CF should be able to be properly formatted.


Keep us informed of progress!


Nial. 

> They've also purchased a 1GB CF card that inserts to the side of the PC104
> board. There is one problem with this. In order to make it bootable he made
> a floppy disk image onto the card and as a result the 1GB card now only
> reads 1.44MB. Using a laptop HDD doesn't seem like a good idea because of
> its moving parts and the vibrations from the car. Looking into a USB atm.

That doesn't make sense.  CF should behave exactly like HDD, but
slower.  I have many systems booting off 1G or 2G CF.  Even if FDD
image is needed.  If could be a virtual drive image within the ext2(or
3) file system.  Alternatively, a 1MB partition 1 and a 0.99G
partition 2.  Can you ask him to explain the need for the FDD format?

On Wed, 1 Sep 2010 07:44:23 -0700 (PDT), linnix
<me@linnix.info-for.us> wrote:

>
>> They've also purchased a 1GB CF card that inserts to the side of the PC104
>> board. There is one problem with this. In order to make it bootable he made
>> a floppy disk image onto the card and as a result the 1GB card now only
>> reads 1.44MB. Using a laptop HDD doesn't seem like a good idea because of
>> its moving parts and the vibrations from the car. Looking into a USB atm.
>
>That doesn't make sense.  CF should behave exactly like HDD, but
>slower.  I have many systems booting off 1G or 2G CF.  Even if FDD
>image is needed.  If could be a virtual drive image within the ext2(or
>3) file system.  Alternatively, a 1MB partition 1 and a 0.99G
>partition 2.  Can you ask him to explain the need for the FDD format?

Yup.  The person might have thought to make it like a bootable CD/DVD
where the boot image loads drivers to access the rest.  But that
shouldn't be necessary here.

George

On Wed, 01 Sep 2010 02:16:22 -0500, in comp.arch.embedded "Darth"
<theforce_vader@n_o_s_p_a_m.hotmail.com> wrote:

>>Darth wrote:
>>> Hey guys, first time posting here. I'm new to PC104. At uni we are
>building
>>> a mini electric race car and the team decided to use a PC104 to run
>>> everything including data acquisition (don't know why they opted for a
>>> ground up system when there were packages available for noobs)

Just wondering how this project turned out.