flash drives for mobile Linux & stuff

[Eugene Leitl <eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de>]

Even small hard drives don't like many g's, so using solid state
drives which are immune to vibration appears sensible. Besides of 
PC cards with a few 10 MBytes flash I've seen solutions which emulate 
an EIDE drive ~40 MBytes, which is more than enough to boot up a
usable Linux system. It looks like a small board populated with 
flash chips and has an EIDE (both standard and laptop version) 
port, but I have no idea how expensive that is, and I don't know 
where to look. Has anybody an idea?

I think that hardware from http://corelcomputer.org (
http://netwinder.org ) because of the small footprint and good
price/performance ratio could also be of interest for aviation
applications, though a small notebook looks like the canonical
hardware platform for amateurs.

The MIT wearable group (start looking at http://wearable.org ) has a
number of very compact, relatively inexpensive shock-proof DIY designs 
based on industry standard small-footprint cards some of which even 
come with affordable head-up display. GPS boards cost next to nothing, 
magnetic sensors for heading info should also be possible to find 
(in a pinch, one might whip up something using a Hall sensor, cobble 
together a circuit for signal level adjustment and pipe it into 
audio-in, reading the signal from /dev/dsp), and there are public 
domain GIS solutions including map plotters with GPS input out there. 
If you can hold up an IP connection to the ground with radio modems 
(there are some solutions up to 20 miles range), or via cellular 
modem you can use SpeakFreely for (secure) voice connections to 
the ground, and offer your GPS coordinate or even still video from 
a webcam via a service so that they can be tracked by the ground station.

An even more wacko idea would be putting a corrective optics with a
focus at infinity in front of the linear CCD of a hacked scanner and 
use the thing to acquire high-resolution imaging of below terrain,
streaming the result to a hard drive. The stripes can be later
combined into contiguous imagery. One would perhaps have to mount 
the CCD head onto a gyro-stabilized platform against the vibration, 
though.

It looks as if one can create something very interesting from existing
components with relatively modest investments in hardware. I don't
have the time nor the means to play with this stuff, but perhaps
somebody here has.

Regards,
Eugene Leitl
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