PC/104 Consortium Launches 2nd Annual Contest

An anonymous reader writes "The PC/104 Consortium is holding a second annual PC/104 Design Contest. The contest will recognize embedded engineers who are designing innovative products based on the group's PC/104 and PC/104-Plus standards for small form-factor modular embedded computers, and winners in three categories will be flown to San Francisco to receive their awards at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco."

How... underwhelming.

[Anonymous Coward]

inners in three categories will be flown to San Francisco to receive their awards at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco.

Considering that PC/104 is super-expensive, you think they'd at least consider some decent prize like say oh... a PC/104 system. I'd much rather have another PC/104 than a trip to meet a bunch of cheap bastards.

last year's winners

[Fat Cow]

last year's winners [pc104.org]

it'd be really fun to enter

[LordMyren]

but pc/104 is way way way too expensive for what it represents. i'll pay 1/4 as much for a non-modular non-standard interface that i have to spend a couple days fscking with the boot loader for and have to recompile for, thanks much.

i can see the appeal in pc/104, but its really hideously overpriced considering the actual manufacturing costs. given how many jumps behind modern pc's it is, it cant be all that hard to design either.

thankfully the new pico/micro/nano and whatnot boards look like they'll st

Re:it'd be really fun to enter

[Voivod]

we just need better standards for low form addon cards (pci) before these rip offs finally bite the bullet they've had coming.

Something to keep in mind is that PC/104 products are often designed and tested to go from -40C to +80C without a fan, deal with factors like radiation and humidity, and have much longer expected lifetimes than "equivalent" products in the consumer PC market. Your cheap VIA Nano-ITX board will blow up when subjected to the conditions PC/104 was designed for, i.e. space, vehicles,

Re:it'd be really fun to enter

[Helmholtz Coil]

I agree, that's why I try to use PC/104 for my projects at work. The temperature range is great, but what usually sells it for me in harsh environments is the shock and vibration tolerance.

I think the best thing about PC/104 is the "vendor depth," i.e. how many companies are out there with PC/104 products. If I need a data acquisition card, or a UPS, or an ARINC-429 communications card (for avionics), I can Google and find somebody that sells them. That way I can concentrate on the software and the whol

Check out www.abiatech.com for affordable PC/104.

[highfreq2]

AbiaTech [abiatech.com] has good prices on PC/104 computers, and I've found there stuff to be good quality. The FB2510 is a 300MHz Geode(decendent of the Cyrix line) system with built in ethernet and VGA/LCD video. It has roughly the performance of a 300MHz Pentium. It doesn't need a fan, which is a big bonus. The price on single units for the FB2510 was $280 about a year ago. The website's price-list is a broken link so you'll have to call to get the current price.

Using them in the DARPA Grand Challenge

[Animats]

We're using three PC/104 systems in our entry in the DARPA Grand Challenge. [overbot.com] We did this for ruggedization and temperature range reasons.

We're using Ampro CoreModule 400 boards. These deliver about 20 MIPS, even though they clock at 133MHz. Basically, they're 486 machines. But they work fine. We have 256MB flash cards in each machine as the "disk". We may upgrade to CoreModule 600 boards when Ampro starts shipping them in about a month if it turns out we run out of CPU power closing the control loops