Have you considered the PocketBeagle. Its power would be a soldered battery 
connection. It is much smaller than a BBB. And per the issues raised by Dennis 
reply, I believe all chips are soldered in. There is a working port of freeRTOS 
with TI starterware on GITHUB which boots fairly fast.

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On 
Behalf Of Dennis Lee Bieber
Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2019 11:53 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [beagleboard] Re: Can BeagleBone Black's OS booting time could be a 
problem in a harsh vibrational environment?

On Wed, 16 Jan 2019 13:20:42 -0800 (PST), [email protected] declaimed the
following:

>
>Hi all,
>
>I'm a beginner in the microprocessor environment, and my job is to find 
>the "best" microprocessor board to be able to perform some data 
>monitoring inside a harsh vibrational environment (Rocket).
>

        Given the environment -- your first task is to eliminate anything not
suited to that usage. So... anything with socketed chips will be out (older
Arduino UNO used a socketed AVR processor).

        What does the monitoring do? Log to persistent memory? Send telemetry
via a radio link? Activate a self-destruct if the parameters go out of
range?


>I looked on all the Beaglebone Black's proprieties and it would be suitable 
>for the project, but one of the members of my team suggest to avoid using a 
>microprocessor (with OS) and go for a microcontroller instead (no OS) like 
>the Arduino because if the vibrations cause a sudden loss of power, the 
>(longer?) booting time of the OS could cause a bigger loss of data.
>

        If there is any realtime aspect, you would want to avoid common Linux.
The BBB PRUs would support realtime -- but the "firmware" gets loaded as
part of the Linux boot, so if there is any chance of processor restarts
that may not be desirable -- not to mention that uncontrolled power-loss
can corrupt the file system! (You do not want a R/W file system if you are
subject to power drops... Everything should be in a read-only memory
system, with logs maintained in either a volatile memory [hence lost if
power fails] or in a separate flash/EEPROM which can be, if corrupted,
reformatted [again losing older logs]*)

        For something more powerful than an AVR... Arduino DUE (are they still
made), or a TIVA C 123 (EK-TM4C123GXL) may be candidates (TI-RTOS modules
for the latter, and I think FreeRTOS has been ported to DUE).


>I have the feeling that vibrations would not be enough to cause loss of 
>power if the connections are well connected, but still, I can't be sure.
>
        As mentioned -- exclude anything with a socketed processor <G>



* in a previous life, I did work on some avionics... that was set up with a
power-loss detection circuit/interrupt, with capacitors to run the
processor long enough for a safe shutdown (eg: store processor state). No
"OS" (it did have an RTOS) that required massive file system operations. It
relied upon finding garbage in part of RAM to determine if it needed to
cold-boot, or could restore the saved state and resume where the interrupt
triggered.


-- 
        Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
        [email protected]    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/ 

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