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I have a Gumstix Overo Fire COM - "Computer On Module". It really is about a size of a stick of chewing gum, however the I/O board it mounts on is much bigger. I'm heavily into woodworking, so I'm planning to make a real nice hardwood case for my Gumstix Android Tablet.

Gumstix sells individual units to hobbyists, but most of us have commercial products in mind, at which point Gumstix offers volume discounts.

The schematics of the I/O boards are Open Source.

Michael David Crawford, who can't be bothered to recover his password.

How is this thing different than a Gumstix? Perhaps the price which is about 10% less, but on the other hand it is has yet to be sold so we don't know the price. And as for fitting a beowulf into a shoebox, well Gumstix was there first

How is this thing different than a Gumstix? Perhaps the price which is about 10% less, but on the other hand it is has yet to be sold so we don't know the price. And as for fitting a beowulf into a shoebox, well Gumstix was there first

... then I think I would try Gumstix for non-speed critical apps.

vaguely off topic...

If you are a Psion fan, you might want to keep one eye on project Psion Resurrection which aims to put a Linux powered Gumstix in a psion shell. Cool

Look at the gumstix: http://www.gumstix.org

Their boards will do everything you've mentioned, they have good documentation, the schematics are under creative commons, and it runs Linux.

Hm... didn't expect the funny mod...

Maybe I should have provided a link

Notice where it says "HTTP Client"...

Have a look at http://docwiki.gumstix.org/Benchmarks, they claim that "generally about the same speed, or slightly faster, than a 233MHz K6, or about 4-6 times the speed of a Pentium 90.", this is for the 400mhz verison.

I think you missed http://pubs.gumstix.org/boards/

You'd think so wouldn't you? Actually, the original /. article was posted when the set up was gumstix-to-brainstem microcontroller. Since then, the gumstix guys have released their own microcontroller card that fits rather nicely as a daughterboard for the gumstix called the Robostix (Wiki entry here) which integrated many of the features we needed and eleminated for nasty soldering jobs to get I2C communication between gumstix and brainstem working. With these latest boards we hope to get 802.11a/b/g working so that we can finally drop the nasty bluetooth networking that has been flakey at best.

they mention "links" among pre-loaded apps on their wiki. I'm not sure it's the same thing that I think it is, but I know such text browser (kinda cool, supports tables and frames).

Just did a check on programming the Gumstix and there's no Ruby support. Damn.
And no VB either? How they going to sell these things?!?!?!?

Check out the Gumstix.org Project. The project has a very nice distribution of sorts with lots of stuff for embedded processors. They have built a configuration utility for setting up your embedded system. Also it does not just support the gumstix hardware, they have support for most of your standard linux architectures. Just get the svn copy of the build root, this page has their svn access instructions. It is also fairly easy to figure out how it works and add extra packages. Just remember if you want to use C++ that is at beta level. Also check out the mailing list and the wiki.

Check out the Gumstix.org Project. The project has a very nice distribution of sorts with lots of stuff for embedded processors. They have built a configuration utility for setting up your embedded system. Also it does not just support the gumstix hardware, they have support for most of your standard linux architectures. Just get the svn copy of the build root, this page has their svn access instructions. It is also fairly easy to figure out how it works and add extra packages. Just remember if you want to use C++ that is at beta level. Also check out the mailing list and the wiki.

Check out the Gumstix.org Project. The project has a very nice distribution of sorts with lots of stuff for embedded processors. They have built a configuration utility for setting up your embedded system. Also it does not just support the gumstix hardware, they have support for most of your standard linux architectures. Just get the svn copy of the build root, this page has their svn access instructions. It is also fairly easy to figure out how it works and add extra packages. Just remember if you want to use C++ that is at beta level. Also check out the mailing list and the wiki.

I'd just prefer a device like this:

- 80mm x 20mm x 6.3mm
- Intel XScale® PXA255 200MHz or 400MHz
- Linux 2.6 + gcc 3.4
- sshd, boa(webserver), wget (webclient) and more
- bluetooth, usb, ppp
- and much more

Starting from $99.00.

And yes, you can make a Beowoulf of these!
Check out the details: http://www.gumstix.org/

As for the Windows dig, I can't see how Linux would result in less interference.

I think that the Windows reference was to dissuade someone from mentioning, for example, a gumstix wrapped in a roll of tinfoil (which was my first thought).

Can be found here.

I think they haven't yet got a Robostix, which we designed to be a replacement for the Brainstem at a much lower price, with a better feature set, and better gumstix integration. Still not much there on the software side for Robostix, but all your normal AVR tools should work great, and control of the robostix from userspace on the gumstix is just around the corner.

comparison:

picotux: 19x19x36mm (12.996 cc), 18 grams
gumstix: 20x6.3x80mm (10.080 cc), 12 grams?
packaged gumstix: 36x15x83mm (44.820 cc), ?? grams

Okay, so the gumstix is smaller. But the picotux has built-in eth.

Depending on how they set up the cross compile environment this could be a very very good thing.

Recently I have been doing lots of devel. work to be used on Gumstix. At present I already need to compile the full root filesystem and flash that to the Gumstix, so there isn't much change there, but provided that the emerge and USE system work well without adding bloat like the emerge system itself or Python to the system image, this would make an excellent tool as it would remove the headache of creating .mk files and ensuring that I have all the right patches for each package, or even worse porting the packages myself. This is all assuming they set the portage system up so that emerge can be used to send packages to the cross compiler and merged into the root filesystem being created.

Many of you talk a good game of prior art, providing oodles of weblinks that supposedly prove your searching brilliance and the Patent Office's ineptitude. However, after looking over the "prior art" references cited in this thread, I fail to see any that would actually fully read on Xybernaut's claimed subject matter.

For instance, both the Nomadic Radio and Smart Cow Collar lack a display controller, and from all appearances also lack any computer components enclosed in the collar that can movably extend outside the collar adjacent to the user's face.

Simply mentioning that the Gumstix computer is small enough to fit under a collar doesn't remotely cover the myriad of claimed limitations in Xybernaut's patent.

This Hewlett-Packard paper merely states, "A collar mounted near-field transceiver allows connection to head-mounted peripherals." Again, nothing about a display controller (or any other computer components) movably extending from inside to outside the collar.

The Invisible Computer talks optimistically about a future when, "Computers will be in your collar, so you can whisper when you talk with them and hear without bothering others." The specific operational structure of Xybernaut's claimed invention is not here either.

Levi's Industrial Clothing apparently comes, "Armed with a remote, [so] you can switch between [an MP3] player and [a mobile] phone, while earphones and microphones are concealed in the jacket collar." No mention of display control. No mention of collar component extension.

This 'Enter the Cyborg' article further describes Levi's Industrial Clothing as having, "a microphone hidden in the collar, and retractable earphones [that] extend out from the shoulders for listening to both music and phone calls." So we have computer component extension -- but from the shoulders, not from the collar. And still, mind you, no display controller enclosed in the collar.

This Carnegie Mellon University paper reveals, "The general areas we have found to be the most unobtrusive for wearable objects are: (a) collar area..." Okay, great. But yet again, no display controller and no collar extension.

The closest prior art comes from Accenture's Personal Awareness Assistant. However, the earliest mention of the Personal Awareness Assistant on Accenture's website appears to be January 2002. And Xybernaut's invention was filed on January 2, 2001. Besides that, saying Accenture's mini digital camera constitutes a "display controller" would be a bit of a stretch. Regardless, Accenture also fails to say anything about "input/output connectors" or "peripheral ports" -- as claimed by Xybernaut. So another dead end here.

Now you may well make the argument that Xybernaut's invention is an obvious variant (where "obviousness" is completely subjective and easily disputable) of the above prior art. But that position is dramatically different from declaring Xybernaut's invention not to be novel. For Xybernaut's invention not to be novel, you would have to find a piece of prior art dated before 2001 that contains each and every limitation recited in claims 1, 11, 20, or 22 (a

There's nothing not to like about a $109 piece of hardware capable of running linux like the Gumstix brought to you by a little ARM processor.

Just use these...

I have been thinking about this lately. I get disgusted by the fanns everywhere (especially since the one in my laptop makes an awful amount of noise sometimes and still doesn't prevent the beast from overheating and shutting down). Aside from being noisy, computers have way more CPU power than I need, and cost more than I am willing to spend. And they suck up a lot of power. (Some might add that they take a lot of space.)

I think all of these could be solved at once. What if someone built low-power, low-noise, and low-cost computer, good enough for running light office applications? I don't mean OpenOffice, but rather lightweight programs that implement the functionality people use _without_ the bloat. My 486 handles email just fine and the WYSIWYG word processors were once satisfied with a first-generation Pentium (and even these were already bloated).

Current PDAs have more than enough processing power to handle those tasks, and I've noticed that company's like gumstix build and sell devices almost like what I have in mind (the gumstix don't seem to have display connectors, though). Hey, these machines could actually be portable and have a really decent battery life (more than a full working day); that would be a killer!

Am I just daydreaming here or are others with me? Maybe you know of devices that do this job? Someone recommended Sharp's Zaurus, which is excellent, but still rather more expensive than what I have in mind.

According to the article, it uses an Intel PXA255. The creator has plans to open source the thing, so if you are truely interested, read the article and contact him. (His name is Gordon.)