San Mateo, CA — (press release excerpt) — SnapGear, Inc. has announced the development of a Linux-based secure embedded appliance for sports and race wagering and fixed odds sports betting over the Internet and telephone, in Australia. The device will be distributed by TAB Queensland — one of Australia's premier racing and sports wagering organizations — and must comply with Australian government… regulations, which require that there be a monitoring service to ensure fair play and accuracy of records.

As a compact, integrated product the Thin Controller replaces a conventional bulky PC. The PCs required several custom plug-in cards all of which had to be sourced from multiple vendors. Now TAB Queensland only needs to arrange supply from a single source and unlike a PC solution they know that the each batch is identical in specification, components and quality. The solid-state design ensures that there is virtually no maintenance and that downtime is minimized.

The Thin Controller is based on a highly integrated motherboard running an embedded Linux operating system based on a Linux 2.4.10 kernel with a fast boot time — on the order of a couple of seconds.

Included on the board are a 133 MHz AMD ELAN SC520 CPU with 128MB of RAM and onboard nonvolatile Flash memory. Onboard interfaces include: two 10/100BaseT Ethernet ports, three serial ports (RS-485 async, RS-232 async, RS-232 sync), and two USB master ports.

 
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