Before I forget

[maradydd]

mycroftxxx, meet kragen. kragen, meet mycroftxxx. You guys need to go sit down somewhere and talk about turning children's tech toys into rugged low-cost computing platforms.

Feel free to use this space if'n you want.

Comments

[mycroftxxx.livejournal.com]

Current interests:
Zipit Wireless Messenger [yahoo group link]

Mattel Juicebox Personal Video Player [linux-hacker.net message board]

The interesting thing about both of these toys is that they are ARM-core computing systems running uCLinux, this seems to be the future of commodity-level computing. Even if linux never dominates the desktop, before too many years pass it will dominate the planet if the economics of embedded linux continue to be so shiny.

[kragen.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I'm relatively ignorant about practical hardware (I never got much beyond building counters and adders out of 74C00s and such) but the area really appeals to me --- it's a lot easier to get kids, or people in general, excited about things that actually work in the real world, than things that happen on a screen.

I have some musings at http://zlab.commerce.net/wiki/index.php/Low-cost_peer-to-peer_pager_devices
about a kind of cheap communication device. Meredith (or Brian Warner?) suggested Gameboys as a useful platform for bootstrapping that kind of thing.

I agree about ARMs --- we aren't going to see MMUs in toys anytime soon, and the ARM seems to rule the 32-bit embedded market. I don't know if uClinux is the most practical platform --- my limited experiences with it have been very annoying.

[kragen.livejournal.com]

See also http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~geobrown/goofy.html --- although they're replacing the brain, not reprogramming it.