Saturday, May 24th, 2008
Bench and Flight Computers are Provisioned
Getting Linux From Scratch on the bench computer took a lot longer than I thought it would, but it’s done. I now have the bench computer running from a 80GB laptop hard drive and the flight computer runs off a 2GB compact flash with a minimal installation.
The next phase will be to write kernel drivers to support the IO cards in the stack, beginning with the digital and analog IO boards. We should be able to control actuators from the bench pretty soon.
I’m really interested in your linux flight computer project. I’ve been wanting to build out a flight computer with a web app interface (I’m a web developer). I can’t wait to see how you put this together!
Although I had not considered having a web server on the flight computer itself, I can definitely see the value in having a clean, scriptable method of accessing the data on the device, particularly in the field. Whether it’s wireless or tethered with an ethernet cable, using a web-browser to drive the non-mission-critical functions from a separate computer could also be handy. Thanks for idea.
Also, I should have some pictures and software up soon. It should run in a virtual environment pretty readily even though the kernel is compiled to specifically handle the AMD CS5535/6 chipset. I will be implementing kernel drivers this week.