PC/104 continues to expand into all embedded areas. Priced at $540, Performance Motion Devices' Magellan-PC/104 Motion Controller handles multiple motors with up to four axes. It supports dc brushed, brushless dc, and step motors. Also, it can communicate via a 16-bit parallel bus, CANbus, or serial port. The board provides servo loop rates of up to 50 µs/axis and a 5-Mcount/s quadrature encoder input rate.
In another breakthrough, Arcom's latest development kit (priced at $1295) uses the company's PXA255 XScale-based Viper single-board computer. It adds support for Wind River's VxWorks 5.5. Based on Wind River's Platform for Industrial Devices profile, the board support package (BSP) supports Arcom's latest wireless and GPS modules.
Arcom www.arcom.comPerformance Motion Deviceswww.pmdcorp.com