There are truly so many really interesting projects around, it is getting hard to stop reading, and hard to stop buying and it is becoming a challenge to make time to progress my own projects!
There is a LOT of really interesting activity in the ‘large power’ board space – ie run an operating system and have access to the IO. There has been a lot of work put into the openWRT project and supporting a wide range of off the shelf hardware. Other groups are creating new hardware and development environments, some examples are:
Just announced this week was the Lophilo, it looks to beat the Olinuxino board to market. There is an interesting discussion about the the Olinuxino and rPi (now delivering the boards!) in the DangerousPrototypes forums and of course there is also the DangerousPrototypes Web Platform. Microsoft have already released their open source Gadgeteer and in recent days even Intel announced they are about to release a system in this space.
Other things that caught my attention include:-
- more fantastic manufacturing insights from Bunnie
- This really interesting part tester from Germany that can identify resistors, capacitors, transistors and FETs and also key properties has triggered a lot of activity to create even better versions:- DP Part Ninja (PIC version) and Part Tester (AVR version)
- $5 micro controller MC HCK
- Little Wire multi function programmer
- AVR In-System Programmer
- Discovering that there are several Arduino interpreters and emulators and even new ones under development.
- Arduino compiling inside Codeblocks, or native AVR (ie non-Arduino) compiling.
- Ardublock, a Graphical Programming Language for Arduino has been very active and now translated into many languages
- Edward Giles (11 years old) is developing a musical instrument kit based on his own PCB!
- Just out yesterday Swarm robots!