Re: [ECOS] Development board advice please

[Christian Plessl <cplessl at ee dot ethz dot ch>]

Hi Roger

 >We're just about to start development work for a prototype. We need to pick
 >a development board to use in our prototype, so I'd like to ask for some
 >advice based on your experience.
 >We must have 2 PCI slots and 2 serial ports (gdb + serial console). We don't
 >need much processing power (a few tens of MIPS would be ample), or memory
 >and no networking is required. The board will be doing a lot of I/O via two
 >PCI digital I/O cards. The priorities are then (starting with the most
 >important):

When looking for a cheap devlopment board and you're not really affraid 
from using x86 technology, you might consider using a MicroATX mainboard. 
These Boards are really cheap and provide many interfaces you may need. 
There are some nice boards providing onboard ethernet and so on too. Most 
intel mainboard manufacturers do have MicroATX products for instance Asus, 
Shuttle, Gigabyte and many more, see for instance:

   http://www.spacewalker.com/english/product.htm


There is a bottomside of using these boards too, they are not really 
intended to be used in deeply embedded applications, so there they do not 
provide onboard flash memory to store your applications. But its possible 
to connect a flash disk to the IDE connectors of course.

Best regards,
  Christian