Le 04/11/11 21:08, Willian Paixão a écrit :
Hi, I'm doing a little helicopter. It's a toy/hobby more or less. With 5 pounds and many features.So, I wanto put a whole embedded system to control it, since wifi connectivity until on-the-fly stablilization.I need some strong processor/board to control all of it. My question is: which is the most linux compatible embedded board in the market? For now, i'm searching something between Atmel and Texas Ins. I have technology enough for build my own board if necessary.So, give me your experiences with your embedded. This little project will be open source/hardware.Thanks a lot.
Hi,Since you can make your own boards, I can suggest to use the Armadeus APF51 processor board. It's only 6cmx6cm and it has an iMX51 ARM CPU @800Mhz, and 256 or 512Mb of RAM and 512Mb of NAND Flash. And it also has a Xilinx Spartan 6A FPGA connected to the iMX bus. It also has a power controller chip that can be supplied by a LiPo battery and the chip can also supervise the charging of the battery, which I guess is a good thing for your project, since you will obviously power it on batteries.
The FPGA could be used to implement virtual peripherals specific to your project, such as PWM controllers, since I guess you'll need to drive DC motors. You can also use it to make a glue interface between the iMX and gyroscope/accelerometers chips, since I guess you'll need those if you want the helicopter to stabilize by itself.
You will need to make your own carrier board for the module.There's no wifi module built-in, but it has usb ports where you could connect a wifi usb dongle, or if you want to make it nicer, you could take a look at the official Development carrier board, which includes a wifi controller chip, so you could probably reuse the design (the schematics are available) and do the same on your own made carrier board.
Armadeus provides a full BSP which includes u-boot bootloader, a linux kernel which fully supports the board, and a busybox based rootfs. The project is well supported and very open, and it's no problem running debian on it, especially since it has a lot of space on the flash.
There's probably other boards out there, that would match your requirements, possibily even better than this one, but out of all the boards I know and have used, that's the best one I can recommend for such a project.
http://www.armadeus.com/english/products-processor_boards-apf51.html Best regards.