From:	Massion, Gene
Sent:	Tuesday, November 06, 2007 3:52 PM
To:	Birch, James
Subject:	Possible contingency project
Jim

Here is a recap of what we talked about yesterday.

MBARI has a continuing need for battery powered computing systems for our sea going equipment.  A general characterization of the requirements is as follows:

Power: as low as possible to a few watts
Storage: Mbytes to 100s (or more) of Gbytes
Compute power: data logging only  to data logging and event detection

The range of solutions has been generally limited to Tattletale or Persistor computer boards with very low power and limited storage and compute power on the low end or a complete custom solution on the high end.  There is a clear need for something in the middle of this spectrum that is as off the shelf as possible requiring minimal to no EE or SE resources.  Until recently, this type of solution has been very hard or impossible to find.  Very few boards are available that meet our low power requirements.  Those that are available require significant SE support to configure the operating system for the desired application.  For example, Linux board support packages for low power hardware rarely if ever support the low power "sleep" modes required for really low power applications.  

Recently a few COTS solutions have been found that appear, after moderate investigation, very likely to meet future MBARI applications where the application programming is relatively simple e.g. instrumentation projects like the upcoming sediment transport activity recorder.  As an example, initial calculations indicate this project may achieve a factor of 3-5 reduction in power consumption over the proposed solution and still meet the project's design goal of no SE resources and only minor EE "consulting" time.  This level of power reduction can potentially reduce the project's battery costs or ship time deployment/redeployment cost by 10s of thousands of dollars per year.  This contingency efforts requests 3 weeks of time of Gene Massion's time and $4000 to investigate this approach.  The goal is to demonstrate a prototype data acquisition system with low power (~1 Watt average power draw), large storage (100-500+ Gbytes), moderate to high performance (24 bit, real time data logging at data rates in the 100s of ksamples/second with ARM9 compute performance).  Alternatively a report describing the problems encountered will be provided.  I wouldn't expect to start this project until MARS is in the water (other than ordering the equipment).

Gene Massion
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
7700 Sandholdt Road
Moss Landing, California 95039
831 7751922 (tel)
831 7751646 (fax)