Neat hardware, open or Linuxy.

[shae]

Luke posted interesting stuff about XOOS (what is that anyway?). By the time I was done replying, I decided it was worth posting here.

Neat hardware:

• The $100 Propeller is an embedded system with eight cores.
• The $30 Arduino is halfway between programming and electronics, has many nifty daughterboards, and is the cheapest fun thing around.
• The $630 BUG is a handsized battery powered Linux box with hotswap hardware modules such as GPS, camera, IR motion detector and accelerometer, tiny touchscreen, breakout module, and more. It also includes gobs of hardware documentation, including schematics, CAD files, etc.
• The $330 N800 is one of Nokia's pocket sized Linux based internet tablets, the newer model is the N810, which has a WiMAX option.

So far I own the BUG, Arduino and N800 (with two 16GB SDHC cards). It's hard to say which is more fun, but the N800 is the easiest to use, as well as being the least hacker friendly.

On the FPGA side, there's the BEE3 and the GNU USRP.

I sort of wish I'd bought a full USRP bundle instead of this ibm bladecenter. It's frustrating to get a used bladecenter running with no prior experience.

By the way, the PS3 is a CPU-powerful but thoroughly hardware-restricted Linux platform. It's no fun for exploring new stuff.