Question regarding your XP install on the CF card. Is the XP version you are using specifically designed for CF cards? Because if not, you’ve probably fried your card. Here’s why…
A typical OS writes temp data to the hard drives’ cache at amazing speeds. CF cards have a finite amount of writes that can be made back to the card until it is worn out (kind of like a rewritable CD). Now I don’t know what the maximum amount of write/rewrites that you can have, but let’s say it’s in the millions (ballpark guess). By the time you have installed the OS, and have tried to boot up, the card will be toast.
On the other hand, OSes that are designed for CF cards keep the temp cache in your Ram (which can be written/rewritten a bajillion times). This prevents the issue from above.
Most high density CF cards have wear-leveling firmware these days that distributes the writes around the array specifically to avoid the burnout situation you address. Not saying it is not possible to wear a CF card out, because eventually you will, but it takes many hundreds of millions of writes to wear a good quality CF card down unless it it nearly full. Still point taken that actually installing the OS to the CF was an incredibly abusive thing to do to it and I knew that but I really have been at a loss to figure out what the issue really is with it not being willing to boot XP from the card. It does boot msdos 6 btw so I am still doubting it is hardware or bios issues, more likely a WinXP thing. Perhaps I will have some luck with the partition magic approach when I get a chance to try.
I went with the 4gb 44pin IDE flash drive, so I dont think my results will help you, as I’m pretty sure the drive acts 100% natively as a harddrive, being that its native interface is IDE.
All the parts to finish him off are ordered, just waiting for them to show up. I already have the Pico-itx cpu/board/ram… pico-psu should be here tomorrow, and hopefully the flash drive and the batteries the day after. I’m shooting for this weekend to get him fully up and running.
Well, I have everything except the 4gb IDE flash drive, unfortunately that is back ordered and not expected in until next week. Last night I powered it up though and loaded windows onto a spare laptop harddrive I had, ran out of time though so wasn’t able to do much more then that.
I’m using a 60w pico-PSU that takes 6-26v in and converts it to the needed voltages and connector to hook up to a small PC. Right now I just have a 12v wall wart powering it, batteries are coming in today.
A few things of note:
The entire setup is very quiet, the laptop drive was basically the only thing making noise, and that will be eliminated once I get my 4gb flash drive in (planning on just ghosting the OS I installed last night over to it). Heat output is extremely low, after 2 hours or so of constant running, the heatsink was just warm to the touch. Overall, speed was pretty impressive… using a USB attached CD-ROM and an old 4gb 4200rpm laptop drive, windows xp install only took about an hour, give or take.
Tonight I’m going to work on a custom serial cable (normal ones are way too bulky considering I only need to connect a few wires) and work on loading up SEQ, wifi/rdp connection and roborealm. Figure I can at least get started working on him while I wait for the flash drive to show up. I’ll try to get some new pictures of it up too.
Sounds awesome! That fact that you can load up SEQ, RoboRealm, and any other windows base software directly on your bot board is amazing. It’s easy for me to forget that the small itx board is actually a PC.
With the Pico ITX, you can do all sorts of real time processing.
Very cool! I can include these in the design for my hexrover! Will appropriate SES compatible brackets for them follow? I have ideas already, so can work something up in 3D. Do you have 2D drawings for the shocks and/or the components (spring, etc) they are made of?
harbor freight has them for really cheap, but the friggin batteries go dead in a couple weeks if you use them regularly. I bought two of them for around $17.00 each.
I unplugged the keyboard/mouse/monitor after windows was loaded and went completely wifi actually…
Here are two pics of it up and running. I dont have the battery hooked up to the pico-PSU, just running it off of a wall-wart for the time being.
Also- still waiting on my solid state HDD to show up, got back ordered and is expected in this week. I’m using a spare laptop harddrive for the time being, once the solid state HDD shows up the ribbon cable + HDD hanging off the side are 100% gone. No wire management to speak of at the moment, just testing things out, and getting it up and running
That’s an RDP session from my desktop to J5’s PC, over my 802.11g wifi network. Both camera’s have their own feed into two instances of Roborealm- each with a different module running. That IDE flash drive really needs to get here, cause I can’t wait to send this guy roaming around the house
Roborealm is awesome though, I’ve been playing with it for about an hour, I’m off to setup speakers on him and work on voice recognition/speech now~!
Same width, about 1/4 of the length of a laptop HDD, and only as thick as standard PCB. So yes, considerably lighter and more compact. It also connects at a 90 degree angle, so really it wont be adding any size to the pico-itx board.
In times past I’ve seen remote desktop applications used in similar situations. The various versions of VNC had my interest (aka free). The important part was being able to also see a video feed from a cam attached to the remote computer. For a more simple control setup, I just used the apache web server and a web cam application.
Will appropriate SES compatible brackets for them follow? I have ideas already, so can work something up in 3D. Do you have 2D drawings for the shocks and/or the components (spring, etc) they are made of?
