I'm trying to put together a DAQ/telemetry system for a race car. One of the components will be up to 4 cameras recording different angles. The data will be handed to an onboard computer (probably a Mini-ITX board, eg M10000, running Linux), and recorded, and (eventually) also transmitted to the paddocks live.

The budget is also limited; and cheaper components are favored (in case the car ends up in a wall, and I have to build another system).

So far, I'm considering three different approaches:

1) Plug in USB2.0 cameras, and record the streams.

2) IEEE1394 (eg Fire-i) cameras; can be daisy-chained into a firewire port.

For both of these setup, do you think the USB/Firewire can handle that much throughput?

3) Use analog cameras (eg lipstick/pinhole cameras), all running into a video capture board. This could possibly have hardware encoding, to relieve stress on the CPU, but how about price?
I've also been told cameras such as the X10 suck...


I'm basically looking for any type of help: hardware/software recommendations, how much you think each would cost (I figure USB2 is ~$50/camera' firewire is ~$80/camera, and analog I'm looking at <$100/camera + $200-300 for a card?).

Also, if anyone has done simlar things, or know a website that shows results, it'd be great!

As far as video camera is concerned; I'm not on national TV, so as long as it looks good, I'm happy. I've downloaded various race videos (and TV rips) with DivX encoding and they look very good whilst maintaining small file size (eg the quality of a typical TV series episode at 350MB is great).

Thanks,
Alex