

Tiny open source computer made from six ICs (hardware startup) - toni
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS3536934446.html

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maximilian
The beagleboard (.org) is way cooler than this thing. Its $149 and has a much
more powerful ARM processor with a built-in DSP and 3d accelerator (probably
similar to the chip powering the iPhone). It already has an HDMI/DVI output
and can also output S-Video. Probably similar in size as well. It has linux
running on it already as well.

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pmorici
I agree, the only advantage I see in this product is as a potential teaching
tool. There isn't a lot of opensource hardware out there to go with all that
software.

This board looses in all categories I would consider important when choosing
an embedded linux board. Those being speed, size, and price. As you mentioned
for a comparable price Beagle Board is much faster with cooler i/o features.
If you are going for price and size the lowest cost Gumstix (gumstix.com) is
like a third the size, slightly more powerful and only costs 100 bucks.

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maximilian
Even as a teaching tool it would suck because it's all surface mount. Sure you
could just buy all the parts, but it'd be near impossible to get surface mount
working reliably in a classroom environment.

My buddies built a robot controller using a gumstix board running linux, so
for doing robots like the article said its pretty shitty for being bigger and
probably having higher power draw.

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pmorici
Most things are SMT these days. You can still solder SMT by hand w/o much
trouble. People are just intimidated by it. It's a lot easier than it looks.
There are some great video tutorials on youTube as well as at sparkfun.com and
[http://www.curiousinventor.com/guides/Surface_Mount_Solderin...](http://www.curiousinventor.com/guides/Surface_Mount_Soldering/101)

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mhb
Sure. But unless it's a board assembly class, the students will spend an
inordinate amount of time becoming proficient at soldering, removing solder
bridges and replacing burned out chips.

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jrockway
This is cool and all, but if it's called a "linux stamp" it should at least
have some I/O capability other than a serial port. (I am thinking of "turn on
the LED" type things.) The basic stamp does really well here, despite being
proprietary, horribly limited computationally, and locked-in to one of the
worst programming languages ever designed (PBASIC). I remember it offending my
sensibilities even when I was in middle school :)

Programming I/O in Haskell would be fun. What would you call the "turn on the
LED" monad? :)

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ajross
It has a USB host port, which at least means that the universe of USB devices
is available. You can get USB RS-232 devices, parallel I/O ("printer ports"),
cheap ADCs ("joystick ports") etc...

But I agree. A tiny microcontroller board is really only useful for what you
can control with it, and out of the box this doesn't do much. Would it have
killed them to toss a dozen bidirectional TTL ports on the thing?

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weegee
wow! can I run Photoshop CS3 on this?

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weegee
boy, you HN people have absolutely NO sense of humor!!!

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whacked_new
I for one welcome our new humorless hackerlords.

Sure, it's humorous, but unsophisticated and shows little effort. I didn't
downmod you, by the way, but I didn't find it funny.

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tjr
I for one don't welcome them. I thought the comment was reasonably amusing --
a Slashdot-esque quip here and there surely does no real harm -- but even if
it were deemed unfunny, is -17 really appropriate? Would not a 0 suffice?

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whacked_new
My /. joke was written in jest. I read funny comments here now and then, but
you have to admit that template jokes get old really fast, and the lack of
thought involved adds a displeasing element to them.

I do agree that -17 is unnecessary though, and I don't understand why it
happens.

