Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 23:09:30 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: board is ok
X-UID: 89
Content-Type: IMAGE/JPEG; NAME="img1838.jpg"

The lower computer board POSTs. It's ok. This saves me a bunch of money 
and time. I just need to find a universal (two notches means 3.3 and 5 
volt signaling, i.e. logic levels) PCI card with USB ports on it that 
works. I'm going to examine this card and figure out what is up with it. I 
need to be able to recognize when a PCI card has this limitation. The next 
time, I may not be as lucky.

I'm going to take this opportunity to wire the motor control board for i2c 
as well as SPI. I look at this board...it's just not the right way to do 
things.

I have a makefile that will take a root filesystem and build a bunch of 
compressed loopback filesystems and install them into a compact flash 
card. It's so much better than doing it by hand.

It made me think that this would be a significant contribution to free 
software. One of my thoughts is that robotics needs to have the same kind 
of advantage that Linux, GNU and open source free software has. The 
barrier to entry is figuring out all of this the first time. Then, no one 
builds anything reusable. This leaves the next guy in the position of 
having to rediscover everything. It's highly inefficient. I see many posts 
from people confused about how to build their firmware Linux distribution. 
A super-intelligent automated build tool would be very useful and 
definitely used, assuming it works and is safe. What modern Linux 
distributions do is take much of the integration work out of the process. 
Building a distribution from scratch is hellishly tedious.