Why Not Use PC To Make Glass Cockpit?

wrote:
Are you ready to bet your life on Windows XP and some $200 disk drives made
in China and designed to operate in an office?


Actually yes. Of course, I would take into the account of
altitude/pressure/temp problems. As a matter of fact, I would be more
comfortable with commodity components than something that's customized,
unless the customization were very very trivial.

Regards,

-Chaud Lapin-

Le Chaud Lapin wrote:
wrote:

Are you ready to bet your life on Windows XP and some $200 disk drives made
in China and designed to operate in an office?

Actually yes. Of course, I would take into the account of
altitude/pressure/temp problems. As a matter of fact, I would be more
comfortable with commodity components than something that's customized,
unless the customization were very very trivial.

If you do that, don't ever plug the machine into the Internet. Also
remove IE.

I take care of about 250 computers, and there's no way I'd bet my safety
on a desktop Windows installation. A customized/embedded/trimmed
version that runs off a ROM might be acceptable if it's been through a
*very* rigorous testing process -- but after you've seen the difference
in performance between a clean machine and a machine after it's been out
in the real world (even with Mozilla Firefox, AdAware, Spybot S&D, *and*
Symantec Corporate Anti-Virus 10 running on it), you won't want to trust
your @$$ to what most people think of as Windows either. A
trimmed/embedded/customized Linux would work too, although I think I'd
be most comfortable with a device running something like VxWorks[0].

As for the disk drives, I recommend a pair CompactFlash storage modules
wired up as IDE devices[1] set up in a RAID mirror setup. That way, the
system is more resistant to things that damage moving parts, and with
the RAID setup, it will continue to run if one of the CompactFlash
devices fails. Use three or four if you don't feel lucky. Of course,
you couldn't run desktop Windows on this because the swapfile would
quickly wear out the CompactFlash (they can only be written a finite
number of times[2]).

-Luke

[0] In one of my earlier jobs, my task was to make VxWorks run on a
single-board-VME Sun clone. I got to read some of the source code, and
it's some of the most carefully documented/commented and sanely designed
C code I've ever seen.

[1] CompactFlash is electrically similar enough to IDE that they can be
wired into an IDE bus without the need for a chip.

[2] I don't remember exactly what the number is -- I seem to remember
that a USB keydrive could take about 500k writes, but it wouldn't
surprise me if that has been extended to a couple of million. Also,
most Flash devices will remap data internally to avoid repeatedly
writing a particular block -- so that the device will last longer.