[svlug] Linux in a Submarine

[Chris Miller]

Interesting problem you guy's would probably solve within a few seconds...

The Amador Valley High School Robotics Club makes a autonimous
underwater vehicle (aka. a submarine) which has to enter a pool, find
an object, and retrieve it.

Right now it has a little 600MHz chip in it that was ripped out of a
PDA/Mobile type thingymajigger (I'm just a programmer - don't ask me!)
 Right now it runs Windows Embedded.  However, Windows doesn't have
hardly any multithreading support (problematic for real-time
computational tasks) and we want to move to Linux.  The problem is
that some of the drivers for the hydrophones and motors we use don't
have Linux drivers.

I've cautioned against reverse-engineering the drivers for Linux
(since that's not our job - we shouldn't have to do that kind of
garbage) though I certainly agree that we should switch to Linux (top
distros for us are Darn Small Linux, Debian, and, of course, Gentoo).

One of the hardware/software guys also tells me that they have a weird
USB->Serial connector which they had to write windows drivers for.

What do you people think we should do?  (PS: if you want to help, they
love help.  Most of the existing program is written in Java 1.4.2,
though we all agree that moving either to Java 6 or C/C++ is a
necessary step.)

I float this past you because I can't think past the driver problem.
Someone else most likely knows a better solution to this than I, so I
ask.

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