I’ve been looking into Microcomputers lately for no real reason.
I’ve always wanted an Arduino but never really had a reason to buy one. I recently came up with the concept of building a binary clock which uses True Binary (like this one, as opposed to the ThinkGeek clock which uses “Binary Coded Decimal”) with NTP sync, as well as being powered by its communication medium, which would mean either USB or 802.3af Power-over-Ethernet. USB would be easier but might require a host program on the PC. PoE would be fine as I want it for a workplace toy anyway, though testing at home would be hard.
The Australian company who originally made the MicroBee microcomputer in the 80s have recently announced their revival and production of the original, with updates including SDCard, ethernet, and a Freescale CPU with uClinux implementation.
I found a cool open source microcomputer called Maximite which seems to have become the de-facto standard for home BASIC interpreter PCs, like the Arduino is to microcontrollers. This thing packs an 80MHz 32-bit PIC with SDCard, USB, host serial, PS2 keyboard and VGA out. Someone’s ported 2BSD (from the PDP-11) to the PIC32, though the manufacturer‘s “PIC32 uClinux Challenge” remains unanswered since 2007.
My favorite finding so far is the Raspberry Pi. Designed as a low-cost single-board-computer for education, this thing packs a 700MHz ARM11, 256Mb RAM, ethernet, USB2, VGA out and GPU capable of 1080p video and Quake 3. Retail looks to be about US$35 (a 128Mb no-ethernet version should be US$25). A limited run of 10 beta boards are on eBay at the moment, one is up to £2050 with three days to go!
I want to get one of them just to support the company. Not for $2k though :P
