Robotic Submarine Running Debian Wins International Competition (debian-news.net)

Also "the point of these competitions is to push the absolute limits of what an autonomous sub can do" and they've done that in every area but the computing. I think my usage of the word embedded is about designing a machine for a particular task that stays within a single device - not throwing standardised (but small), vastly overpowered, high-power consumption hardware at a task. It's not *wrong*, but it's not the revolution that it's made to sound.

Those kind of software projects are knocked up on every university CS course every day - I've done them myself - but it's translating them to a real-world system that doesn't involve putting a full PC inside a sub that's the interesting part.

And they push power-saving as being the dominant factor, but that doesn't ring true if they are using off-the-shelf components of that spec and just "brute-forcing" the visualisations (and is it just me or does nowhere publish the wattage of that board?). A Core-2 processor takes a fair amount of power.

And in a competition scenario, that might not be their top priority, but then why mention power in the press release? And in the context that a *particular* open source video processing library gives "significant power savings"? Seems they *were* thinking about the power but still threw a Core2 at it!

35 students spent a lot of time on this. It seems sad that the computing side is more about "WE USED DEBIAN" than actually making something efficient, but it looks like the engineering side have done a fabulous job.

I think the project is good. But I think the computing hardware side is pretty average - the sort of thing anyone would try first as a prototype with a view to replacing it later - although the software itself might be interesting (not the OS used), and the fact that it's pushing Debian seems... wrong and irrelevant. It seems gratuitous mentions of a particular flavour of an OS warrant more recognition than the sub itself, almost.