data acquisition, serial interfaces

nice little article summarizing the various serial bus standards for ic networks: rs-232, rs-422, rs-485, spi, i2c, mirowire, 1-wire, and plain old bit banging. a bit dated at 2002, but still handy.

looks like rs485 is what you need for high-speed transmission over significant distances. spi slows down a lot when you take it off the pcb and looks more like a can bus.

maybe the way to go for low volume is a tiny linux server. lantronix makes the xport pro. digi international makes the digiconnect me (or digi connectme?) that can run picotux. marvell semiconductor makes the sheevaplug. all pretty small and lightweight, and you can just plug an ethernet cable into the darn thing and forget about it.

hmm, the xport pro seems to be highly geared toward network services and the external interface is limited to ~8kB/s serial. digi connect me 9210 might be better for data logging. or maybe gumstix? it's hard to find specs for data acquisition on their website.

mccdaq.com have some ~reasonably priced boards, though their stuff looks like it's either pci boards or clunky usb endpoints. multichannel, though.

another route would be a high-speed usb (up to 40MB/s) with the cypress ez-usb fx2lp (like cyzc68013a). check out www.elrasoft.com/hsusbm.htm and the project listed there by dcarr.