Re: Another New Hardware Thought

[Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon@news.widomaker.com>]

On 2007-05-05, Roger Johnstone <roger@roger.geek.nz.removethisbit> wrote:

> Forget PCs. If you want a simple 8-bit computer system that's still 
> being actively developed and sold buy a microcontroller developer kit. 
> Some of the kits are available for very low prices, the documentation is 
> generally excellent and freely downloadable, and for many there are free 
> BASIC and C compilers available. If you program it in assembly you'll 
> even have the advantage of getting to know what every memory bit and 
> processor cycle is doing :o)

What's a good source for them?

I've not found any trainer boards or SBCs that were not kind of
expensive.

Also, it is a lot more interesting if it is a machine that you can do
real work with.

Of course, eventually you could create that with your own system, but it
is nice to work on a system many others work with.

I've been thinking it would be nice to build a simple computer using
32-bit MIPS CPUs. Nice instruction set, not very expensive, and you
could probably build a simple system that was still fast enough to do a
decent amount of work.

Just a thought.


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["There are nowadays professors of
philosophy, but not philosophers." ]