Dan,
This post is very interesting, and I've discussed the idea several
times in the past few years.
The thing is, I've never actually started down that path, because I've
never had both the money and the time all at once. What you're
proposing is not a simple project.
The site you pointed out is one I haven't seen before, and it looks
really interesting for the computerized control applications.
Particularly promising is the sampling rates for all the inputs and
outputs.
You might also want to investigate here:
http://www.parallax.com/html_pages/products/basicstamps/basic_stamps.asp
The BASIC 1 USB stamp can be had for $40, although it's slow and not
many features. The site caught my eye a while back, I remember the
prices being a lot lower, there might be somebody else who has taken
over the low cost embedded market for the hobbyist now. I seem to
remember something that could be had for a single digit number of
dollars, maybe the stamp was never it.
I would recommend against just taking a laptop into your hovercraft
all the time. The cost of a laptop, and their fragility, makes them a
bad choice for something which controls basic function on your
machine. You might want to look into PC-105 computer boards, there is
a whole industry around the embedded controller market. Whatever you
do, by the time you get it all on your hovercraft you will have spent
Real Money.
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