Some of you might know that I have been working on some machine vision stuff for a man who is a Volcanologist at the United States Geological Survey. He has a need to monitor Mount St. Helens with cameras to see what is moving around inside the volcano. I have a buddy at work named Evan who recently got his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at Duke University. We have purchased an industrial quality, fanless, no moving parts, PC from an outfit in Thailand and a couple of cameras from a German company. We are going to add a derivative of Linux, probably PuppyLinux, and set it up as a low power, highly portable way for taking pictures in relatively harsh environments. The computer itself is VERY cool. You can get the most limited version of it for $85. It looks like this:
Nohrtec MicroClient JrSX
The thing to the left of the computer is a compact flash card. To those who know about such things, it will give you an idea of how small the system is. We are going to take the open source, machine vision software we are developing (KamVu), port it to Linux, add some functionality for this application and send it off to see whether the USGS can use it to put in their volcanoes. It should be a lot of fun.