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The Gumstix would be the most robust option but that's a few hundred dollars.

You could consider the SitePlayer which is put together by a company that also does basic stamp clones, or a Parallax PINK.

These development kits run about $100. The SitePlayer would be a good option if you want to make more than 1 because the actual module is only $30, however if you are only going to build one of these tools I would suggest spending the extra $100-$200 and get a Gumstix because you can simply do so much more (and Bluetooth and WiFi over CF is are options as well, which could be useful later on).

Ebay is your friend.

Also consider going with PICs, Basic Stamp, SitePlayer (a webserver on a chip), the BugBook books and hardware, 8085-based systems, or some other simplistic frameworks.

A year or so ago, I was lamenting how complicated (and unapproachable) systems had gotten, and a friend proved me wrong when he pointed toward some similar set of suggestions. There are a zillion interesting ways to learn practical/basic digital electronics now, rather than fewer. And the results can be delightfully cheap: simple atmel pic's sell for a buck or 2, can be programmed by some funny homebrew parallel/serial port interfaces that are equally cheap, etc.

And then there's USB, digital A/V, etc.

Depending on what aspect of pc design (memory, buffering, hardware I/O, signals/timing, computation, real-time circuits, homebrew SCADA, animatronic/smart toys, robotics, or whatever), you can either go retro using modern equivalents to old hardware or do enough to learn concepts and then fast-forward to the newer tools.

Old hardware rocks, I can't get enough of it :)

You said it. If you actually want some more details on what I have on my network, the systems involved are:

• A PIII-450 system with 384MB RAM running OS/2 WARP Server for e-business as my general workstation for running DOS, Java, OS/2, and X sessions,
• A Celeron 550 box with 128MB RAM running RedHat 8. This acts as my network fileserver, DNS (I'm starting to build up too many systems to want to worry about coordinating the hosts files between them all), and automated nightly build system for jSyncManager Project, running in headless mode,
• My 1.33Mhz PowerBook G4 laptop (which has been taking over most of the duties I used to use the OS/2 box for these last few months), networked wirelessly (everything else is wired),
• The P-133 with 32MB RAM acting as my own personal mail server, running RedHat 8 (a brutal install to pare it down to fit on the 1GB drive in that system, and yet still be semi-useful. :P), also running headless,
• An AMD K6-2 running at 450Mhz with 128MB RAM, an old CD-ROM drive, and absolutely NO hard drive, running Knoppix. I use this as a guest machine -- it has Mozilla and OpenOffice on it, so if a visitor wants to check their e-mail or surf the web or work on a document, they do it on this machine (as they can do whatever they want to it, and all I have to do to restore it is a reboot),
• A PlayStation 2 with Sony Linux for the PlayStation 2 installed. With the kits 40GB of hard drive space, this acts as both my file server and my media server (I did the first official port of Ogg Vorbis to the PS2 on this system) -- being able to do 48Khz output via optical cable to my home theatre makes this a wonderful media box,
• A SitePlayer Developers Kit. Not doing anything particularily useful, but I'm eventually going to get into the microcode and make this into a web-enabled controller for my homes X10 network,
• An IBM WorkPad c505 (mostly for jSyncManager network sync development).

I've had more systems, but that's what's currently running on my network. I've had a few people promise me some more systems -- I'm just trying to figure out what to do with them before accepting them (after all, have to put them to good use...;) ).

Yaz.

Well d*mn... I went through the trouble of designing and building an Internet (ethernet) enabled coffee maker two years ago, using the very same Siteplayer module they use in the book.

Mine's much better though as it's fully contained (powersupply and all) within the free space inside... and no tethering of the decanter. It's a "sleeper". :)

But i looked at this solution before

There's something a bit better out.. cause it's cheaper and only 1 chip big... It's made bay NetMedia and called SitePlayer. www.siteplayer.com

This isn't really new. Ever heard of siteplayer?

http://www.siteplayer.com/