What would be best for this application? beagleboard? raspberry pi?

I suggest looking at the STMicroelectronics STM32F4DISCOVERY and STM32F3DISCOVERY boards.  They use ARM Cortex-M4 processors which have DSP instructions and the chips have analog I/Os.  If your application fits, it's a cheap way to go.  Both are available from element14, at least in USA.

Thanks for the reply john!

Just had a quick look at f4discovery and they really are quite cheap at approx £10 here in the uk. ( that does sound correct) which would be very suitable at i have a fairly low budget. Just a quick question, would this board be capable of attaching a webcam to for the camera system to take pictures and store them say approx 1 image per second? Id like them to be saved to an sd card if that would be possible for ease of use.

Thanks again

yasin sheikh wrote:

 

Just had a quick look at f4discovery and they really are quite cheap at approx £10 here in the uk. ( that does sound correct) which would be very suitable at i have a fairly low budget. Just a quick question, would this board be capable of attaching a webcam to for the camera system to take pictures and store them say approx 1 image per second? Id like them to be saved to an sd card if that would be possible for ease of use.

Here's my guess: I think the STM32F4DISCOVERY has the hardware interfaces needed for a USB webcam and for an SD card, though you'd have to wire up a socket.  OTOH, I don't know whether the software you'd need for those interfaces is readily available.  Bare metal programming is really easy on a Discovery board.  However, a lot of people would rather just run Linux so they can use Linux device drivers and not deal with the bare metal.  When you run Linux you generally need to accept a truckload of stuff you don't need and a general-purpose Linux won't fit in 1MB Flash plus 192KB RAM.  Now a proper Linux hacker will tell you that you can build your own kernel and fit Linux into a tiny footprint, but I get the impression that the learning curve for that is more painful (JMO/YMMV) than bare metal programming.  Like all engineering problems, you have a trade-off.

Shawn's offer of a BeagleBone is very attractive.  It's a really powerful board.  According to my read of the TI AM3359 TRM, it doesn't have a DSP per se.  I don't know how much DSP your application needs.  OTOH, you can probably use the AM3359 Programmable Real-time Unit Subsystems (PRUSS) for some DSP operations using their MAC hardware.  PRUSS looks like a lot of fun.

I have accepted Shawn’s offer of the beaglebone, I think I will take it from there as it should be capable of meeting some of the requirements needed for the project. I think I’ll start by getting to grips with the board (complete novice), before moving on to the camera system first, and upon receiving the specs for the hydrophone, try and included that within the system as well.

I don’t think i will need a lot of DSP to be honest, as long as I can record the data easily from say an accelerometer and hydrophone, and integrate that with the camera function I should be okay.

There is actually a camera capecamera cape for the BeagleBone coming out very soon: http://uk.farnell.com/circuitco/bb-bone-cam3-01/board-beaglebone-camera-3-1mp-cape/dp/2144194 - it might be useful? You could team it up with the breadboard capebreadboard cape and use some ultrasonic sensors like COMPACT suggests perhaps.

There is actually a camera capecamera cape for the BeagleBone coming out very soon: http://uk.farnell.com/circuitco/bb-bone-cam3-01/board-beaglebone-camera-3-1mp-cape/dp/2144194 - it might be useful? You could team it up with the breadboard capebreadboard cape and use some ultrasonic sensors like COMPACT suggests perhaps.