Well, we finally ordered the hardware that will be controlling the GUI display and interact with the electronics on the motorcycle. We decided to go with the ALIX.1C.
The motherboard comes with the following features:
- 500 MHz AMD Geode LX
- 256 MB SDRAM on board
- 12V DC, DC-DC converter on board. (No bulky ATX PSU needed)
- miniPCI + PCI + LPC
- 1 LAN, 2 COM, 4 USB, 1 LPT, audio, VGA
- Fanless
The motherboard is a mini-itx form factor and only 6.7″ x 6.7″ and only consumes ~5watts which is great. I installed Debian Etch on the 2GB CF (Compact Flash) card and it boots very quickly. I did a standard Linux install from my laptop to the CF card plugged into a card reader since I don’t have an external CD drive. The The installer app recognized the CF card as secondary hard drive and allowed me to easily partition and install. The install did rewrite the MBR on the hard drive in my laptop but I used an Ubuntu rescue disk with grub-install to fix the problem. I then had to update the GRUB install on the CF card to get all the disk info pointed in the right direction. Linux recognized all my hardware and everything seems to be working properly. The next step is to slim down the install and work on speeding up the boot time. I’m probably going to compile a custom kernel optimized for the project. I was kind of skeptical about heat issues since the motherboard is fanless. After running for over an hour it was surprisingly cool which surprised me since I expected it so be much warmer. For more info about the mother board check out the manufacturers site
