Linux and PC104 Boards

Hi, I am working with a group and Computer and Electrical Engineering student to design and Unattended Ground Vehicle. We have run into problems with our current Single Board Computer and are looking to purchase a new one along with a frame grabber. I guess my questions are:

1) Has anyone used a PC104 and Frame Grabber along with Linux? If so, could you give me a few options that would be good? We have been looking at the Viper and Vulcan boards at Arcom's website as some possible solutions.

2) If the board itself comes with Linux 2.6.x, Do we need to get the cross compiler online somewhere to write code for the SBC? it comes with the Embedded system on the board along with the GNU C Library.

I appreciate any help or advice you can give, if you would like more information on the exact boards we are looking at or any other part of this project, please let me know and i will give more info

Thanks!!

You need crosscompiler only if processor architecture is different. In other case you should only be careful with optimization options -mcpu and -march .

Since PC104 board SBC's can come with many different configurations and CPU architectures (including some that are not even x86 based), I think you may need to state which one you are using. I don't think this is a "one solution for all" kind of question.

The Viper and Vulan use an XScale, which is ARM based not x86. In which case you will need to compile for ARM targets, which would be cross compiling. There are definately GCC arm toolchains around, although I cannot pretend I have compiled to ARM with GCC, and couldn't tell you if it is simply a command line option, or you need a special build of GCC configured for ARM.

I am afraid I have no idea about the frame grabber.

Danny

there is lots of options available in small low power systems

I'd be going with something like the mini-itx boards from via