Havard and I plan to build our own minimal embedded linux board. For not much more money than what this is going to run us, there are already some pretty impressive single board computers out there.
But, we're going for the satisfaction of building something rudimentary from the ground up.
This all started when a labmate of ours told us of a website run in Tokyo that sells very cheap LCDs and other odds and ends that very well serve electronics hobbyists.
After looking around at what they had to offer, we decided on these 300 yen (about $3US!!) 320x240 Casio LCDs that are apparently either used or taken from some unsold stock of something.
First we set up a simple framebuffer on a Digilent Spartan 3 Starter board. Here is what that looks like:
But the hardware is not much without some software to run with it. That, and we wanted to have something that's not really just a big prototype on the table. After much time thinking about what to do, we eventually decided to try designing a simple SBC. More to come on the decision and design process.
In the meantime, I'm playing around with an AVR32 Linux board that I have sitting around. It's very different from what our project will be, but it's definitely helping me feel my way around embedded linux in some ways.
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