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WillWare writes "Here's a nifty microcontroller project being done by Ryerson Amateur Radio Club in Canada. They are building a SIMM board with a Motorola Dragonball (same processor as the Palm Pilot), 4 meg of flash, 8 meg of DRAM, some digital I/O pins, ports for Ethernet and RS-232, and able to drive a 320x240 LCD panel. This board is intended as a target for their MMU-less Linux port, which has previously been running on Palm Pilots. There has been mention on the mailing list of the possibility of running a Python interpreter on this board. This would be a huge win for rapid app development on embedded controllers. "

WillWare writes "Here's a nifty microcontroller project being done by Ryerson Amateur Radio Club in Canada. They are building a SIMM board with a Motorola Dragonball (same processor as the Palm Pilot), 4 meg of flash, 8 meg of DRAM, some digital I/O pins, ports for Ethernet and RS-232, and able to drive a 320x240 LCD panel. This board is intended as a target for their MMU-less Linux port, which has previously been running on Palm Pilots. There has been mention on the mailing list of the possibility of running a Python interpreter on this board. This would be a huge win for rapid app development on embedded controllers. "

hin writes "At the recent ISSCC in San Francisco, a review paper was presented at the conference in regard to the feasibility of carbon nanotubes for use in semiconductors. " As most people know, put nano in something, and you'll get my attention-but these engineers are talking about using carbon nanotubes that would be hexagonally shaped (thoughts of benzene rings run through my head), and can be as small as 1.4 nm, and as long as 10 microns. There are still a significant number of hurdles to jump before having this even practical, but as the artile states: "It's becoming an experimental field of research rather than a theoretical one."

nelsonrn writes "Two university groups are working on designs for tiny Linux boxen reminiscent of the Compaq Itsy: UNSW's Pocket Linux Embedded Box (PLEB), an Intel/ARM SA-1100 based box, and Ryerson's uClinux simm, a 1" tall Motorola/68K Dragonball-based Linux box on a simm. Both have serial ports and LCD interfaces, but the PLEB has IR and the uClinux simm has Ethernet. Both ports are booting on their respective development platforms. Coincidentally, both projects are currently laying out their boards in preparation for a run of prototypes." Update: 01/31 10:39 by S : In related news, Tarcus posted this ARM multiprocessing set of PCI cards manufactured by Chalice Technology which make for a cheap Beowulf cluster.

Mark Spencer writes "The microcontroller-linux group has released a kernel patch against 2.0.33 and made kits available, including the xcopilot emulator so you can try it out even if you don't have a PalmPilot or microcontroller handy. If you are interested, check out their FTP site or their web site uClinux runs on motorola microcontrollers based on the 68k processor. The Palm Pilot is currently used as the development platform. "

Mark Spencer writes "The microcontroller-linux group has released a kernel patch against 2.0.33 and made kits available, including the xcopilot emulator so you can try it out even if you don't have a PalmPilot or microcontroller handy. If you are interested, check out their FTP site or their web site uClinux runs on motorola microcontrollers based on the 68k processor. The Palm Pilot is currently used as the development platform. "

Raju Tavadia wrote in to give us this link and this one to a pair of articles about the Palm III- with pictures of the beast.

Hans Cathcart wrote in to correct me on James Nicolson's comments yesterday about the 3com/Pilot/Linux port. Apparently The Linux/microcontroller Project is still doing the port, so I'm not sure what 3com's connection was in all this. The huge response that the article recieved on Slashdot is something that high ranking people at 3com should see. Geek appeal sold a lot of Pilots- Linux will sell even more. They should do everything they can to support this project (read:Big cash donations to TLMP).

I was sent in this story by several people but the first was Robert Herrmann. This place speaks about a Linux/Pilot port. It's rough, but it'll probably smooth out if the project gains some intertia.