Embedded Linux?

[Bored_Engineer]

Hello all, I have been toying with the idea of putting a BeagleBoard -xM (beagleboard home) on-board my next ROV to act as an on-board computer to process video, control the thrusters(via an Arduino most likely), and to act as a server to relay all the data to my laptop(tcp/ip). My reasoning for this is the board has an expansion header for cmos camera boards (Here), and can accept usb 2.0 peripherals, like my HD webcam, which would be better than using the usb extenders i had on my original ROV. Has anyone worked with this kind of thing or have any input?

Thanks in advance

[Seadragon]

I am in a similar quandry about using the Raspberry Pi You can run linux on the beagle board by using a flash drive version of the linux distribution on a Micro SD card. You can make a hard drive install after you let the card configure it self for the installed hardware.

both have pretty good capabilities.

I have some experience with linux distros on older hardware but am just getting started on embedded linux.

I know that the inclusion of an onboard computer will reduce the umbilical connections.

Hope this helps.

[Bored_Engineer]

Hey, thanks for the reply! Sorry it's a little late, but I was wondering if you have made any progress in embedded linux? I too have some experience in linux for x86 but not too much in the embedded area. I have heard of the Raspberry Pi, and it does sound interesting, however I'm not sure I need something that has a GPU built into it. I have also reconsidered the Beagleboard -xM for this same reason, I am thinking instead of something like the Beaglebone (http://beagleboard.org/bone) which is more reasonably priced than the -xM, and has more expansion headers and from the sounds of it, is easier to develop hardware expansion. its processor is a ARM cortex A8, the only thing im not sure about is if it could stream the feed from a camera to the surface. This is where I'm not sure about the GPU area, does the board need the GPU to encode the stream from the camera or can it just port the camera feed directly to the network? Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks!