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I would go with a rooted nook because it has Bluetooth which the Fire lacks. It also has a faster CPU than the PI. The real benefit of a rooted Nook would be Google Nav.
If you have an android phone that you can use as a hotspot you can use this app
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.comptonsoft.tgps_lite
To share your GPS with the Nook or any other rooted android tablet.
You could also work this in just for fun http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10227
And for real fun you could combine this.
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/11028
With this http://www.sparkfun.com/products/11058
and this http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10530
To make a GPS updated IMU that would mimic a GPS but keep your location for short periods of time if you drop GPS lock.
And Yes I have been toying with the idea of mounting a Nook color or some other 7" tablet on my motorcycle handle bars using a RAM mount or on a tank bag for navigation.

I would go with a rooted nook because it has Bluetooth which the Fire lacks. It also has a faster CPU than the PI. The real benefit of a rooted Nook would be Google Nav.
If you have an android phone that you can use as a hotspot you can use this app
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.comptonsoft.tgps_lite
To share your GPS with the Nook or any other rooted android tablet.
You could also work this in just for fun http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10227
And for real fun you could combine this.
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/11028
With this http://www.sparkfun.com/products/11058
and this http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10530
To make a GPS updated IMU that would mimic a GPS but keep your location for short periods of time if you drop GPS lock.
And Yes I have been toying with the idea of mounting a Nook color or some other 7" tablet on my motorcycle handle bars using a RAM mount or on a tank bag for navigation.

I would go with a rooted nook because it has Bluetooth which the Fire lacks. It also has a faster CPU than the PI. The real benefit of a rooted Nook would be Google Nav.
If you have an android phone that you can use as a hotspot you can use this app
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.comptonsoft.tgps_lite
To share your GPS with the Nook or any other rooted android tablet.
You could also work this in just for fun http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10227
And for real fun you could combine this.
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/11028
With this http://www.sparkfun.com/products/11058
and this http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10530
To make a GPS updated IMU that would mimic a GPS but keep your location for short periods of time if you drop GPS lock.
And Yes I have been toying with the idea of mounting a Nook color or some other 7" tablet on my motorcycle handle bars using a RAM mount or on a tank bag for navigation.

I would go with a rooted nook because it has Bluetooth which the Fire lacks. It also has a faster CPU than the PI. The real benefit of a rooted Nook would be Google Nav.
If you have an android phone that you can use as a hotspot you can use this app
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.comptonsoft.tgps_lite
To share your GPS with the Nook or any other rooted android tablet.
You could also work this in just for fun http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10227
And for real fun you could combine this.
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/11028
With this http://www.sparkfun.com/products/11058
and this http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10530
To make a GPS updated IMU that would mimic a GPS but keep your location for short periods of time if you drop GPS lock.
And Yes I have been toying with the idea of mounting a Nook color or some other 7" tablet on my motorcycle handle bars using a RAM mount or on a tank bag for navigation.

While not as cheap might I suggest this.
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10585
Plus maybe a Nook Color rooted or any number of the Android tablets on the market?

Well, I have a (composite) display and a (USB, linux-supported) touch overlay laying around right now, so that would be vastly (~$150) more expensive than the R-Pi (~$50.) If I didn't have anything the savings would be smaller, so that would make more sense; a used fire maybe. I could use the components of my EEE701, but it's a working package right now so I'm hesitant to disassemble it. I am considering it, however the small footprint of the R-Pi is a major feature in this application as well because if I yank all the user interface stuff out of the climate control module I should be able to stuff both a R-Pi and a small Arduino in there, as well as a dinky power supply which I've got already, and still have room in there for all the stuff that needs to be in there to run the climate control. Then I get the entire space of the stereo for an amplifier, or I can use a shorter stereo and recess it a little and actually leave a whole stereo back there. I have an amplifier I can use but I'd have to solve a noise problem first. I have a noisy amplifier in my truck because it is noisy anyway.

check the Pi wiki. Although not many people own one yet, there are a hand full of hardware extensions in the works or already available. I find it amazing how a small eco system around the Pi is already evolving:

- Expansion Boards
- Peripherals
- GPIO Documentation

Sparkfun has these BlueSMIRF BT modules which can be connected to one of the uarts of the Pi.

While not as cheap might I suggest this.
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10585
Plus maybe a Nook Color rooted or any number of the Android tablets on the market?
You would have lots of IO, A touch screen and so on. Assuming that your phone is Android or maybe symbian you can use the GPS and wifi in your phone for the tablet so you have 3g and nav.
Just an idea.

I think the most important thing at your son's age is for him to be able to write a small fragment of code & see its effect. Something as basic and accessible as an Arduino is perfect for this type of experimentation. To link you to a few resources, the main arduino site is http://arduino.cc./ You can find examples of some of the cool add-ons at http://sparkfun.com/

You might even have some fun with one of these things yourself!

I recently got a Nest thermostat and must say I'm quite pleased with it and have noticed a noticeable reduction in my heating bill with its auto-away feature. The fact that I can control it via my Android phone is even better. I had an old Honeywell thermostat that could also estimate how long it took things to reach temp but had to replace it years ago since it didn't support my multi-stage furnace. The Nest is extremely well made. Be sure to also check out the Nest teardown.

Have you heard of this? http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8785

What about This?

This.

$99 for that? Just buy a cheap smartphone and get a free touch screen and Android.

This.

Several of us have been doing this for years now. http://diydrones.com/

I have had a self guided drone that will take off and land on it's own as well as fly to preprogrammed waypoints for over a year now. It runs off of an arduino http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8785

ham radio ATV is the video feed and I send packet data via cellphone to control it. I am hoping to get a Android phone to make it completely cellular based for video and control to avoid the problem with using Ham radio (long range is a problem with HAM and fast scan ATV.

I am glad a Professor has finally caught up to us hobbyests that have been dinking with it for years now.

gee, i wonder where they got the idea? http://www.sparkfun.com/categories/135

SparkFun sells a temperature-controlled iron perfectly suitable for general SMD work for $40. Sure, that's more than the cost of the computer, but I suspect it's less than computer + addon board. Yes, a good iron used to cost $150, but that's simple no longer true. (Sure, the $150 iron is somewhat better, but the $40 one can do 1.27mm gull wing packages just fine.)

I was just looking at these a couple of days ago... they don't have the range I needed, but would work great for books.

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9875

A short video on Youtube about these....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ioDBOOAFvM

Have fun!

There are numerous kits available, best sources for choosing one would be http://www.pololu.com/ , http://www.trossenrobotics.com/ , http://www.robotshop.com/ , http://www.lynxmotion.com/ , http://www.makershed.com/ and a bunch of others. http://sparkfun.com/ and http://adafruit.com/ for more general electronics components

Cant really recommend one in particular, as it depends on what you want to do. There are several categories : 2wheel differential drive bases, legged hexapods, 4wd bases, even bipeds and robotic arms.

If you get one that is designed to be Arduino-compatible, and can take any number of Arduino expansion shields, you will have endless possibilities. I'd say easiest starting point is a complete 2WD kit with some accessory sensors. This is a nice one http://www.makershed.com/product_p/mkseeed7.htm , comes with motors and all. Just pick a "mainboard" and motor driver shield and you are good to go.

Hmm, this IMU is a 1.1 by 1.6 inches circuit board with not many components on it, so not much. Even if we're talking mil-spec, I have a feeling they could squeeze one in.

Sounds like a job for the Sparkfun UberTracker! It grabs GPS coordinates and sends them out via email using the cell network. It polls the GPS at a programmable interval (as much as once per minute or as little as once per day). Not sure if it can be programmed to start sending coordinates upon being moved though, so you may have to just activate it whenever you park the vehicle. Total cost: $325 + shipping.

This is not new so i wonder why it is news, soft modems have been around for a while.
arduino + soft modem + stepper motors.

I was strangely about to start playing around with this when i refreshed slashdot.
I have gotten a soft modem from http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10331 so can i have $92,684?

Arduino Uno (and make it act as HID) with this shield or this shield using Buttons/Switches, Knobs/Meters (only specifying SparkFun because other places I've used with much better ranges require bulk purchases) in/on some like one of these enclosures.
Everyone can bitch about how the Arduino is a hobbyists tool but after getting the parts I managed to whip up a working and ready-to-be-implemented control board which controls a rotatory camera mount under an aircraft so you can do alot with very little.

Arduino Uno (and make it act as HID) with this shield or this shield using Buttons/Switches, Knobs/Meters (only specifying SparkFun because other places I've used with much better ranges require bulk purchases) in/on some like one of these enclosures.
Everyone can bitch about how the Arduino is a hobbyists tool but after getting the parts I managed to whip up a working and ready-to-be-implemented control board which controls a rotatory camera mount under an aircraft so you can do alot with very little.

Arduino Uno (and make it act as HID) with this shield or this shield using Buttons/Switches, Knobs/Meters (only specifying SparkFun because other places I've used with much better ranges require bulk purchases) in/on some like one of these enclosures.
Everyone can bitch about how the Arduino is a hobbyists tool but after getting the parts I managed to whip up a working and ready-to-be-implemented control board which controls a rotatory camera mount under an aircraft so you can do alot with very little.

Arduino Uno (and make it act as HID) with this shield or this shield using Buttons/Switches, Knobs/Meters (only specifying SparkFun because other places I've used with much better ranges require bulk purchases) in/on some like one of these enclosures.
Everyone can bitch about how the Arduino is a hobbyists tool but after getting the parts I managed to whip up a working and ready-to-be-implemented control board which controls a rotatory camera mount under an aircraft so you can do alot with very little.

Arduino Uno (and make it act as HID) with this shield or this shield using Buttons/Switches, Knobs/Meters (only specifying SparkFun because other places I've used with much better ranges require bulk purchases) in/on some like one of these enclosures.
Everyone can bitch about how the Arduino is a hobbyists tool but after getting the parts I managed to whip up a working and ready-to-be-implemented control board which controls a rotatory camera mount under an aircraft so you can do alot with very little.

Considering that the Arduino Uno sells for 30$USD, I'm still impressed by the specifications of the Raspberry Pi.

As with all things, fine if you can build it, fine if you can find yourself a nice group buy for the parts and the boards, but for the most part there's only a hand full of items sold by Sparkfun that are more expensive than the sum of the core components if they aren't sourced from very decent places. Want an example?:

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/710

I bought something similar for $5 less off ebay. It came with no datasheet, no pinout, nothing. Given the proliferation of these LCDs, and the inability for them to play along nicely with each other I wasted half a day figuring out the damn pinout. Next time I'm spending the $5 more.

Another example? They sell an ATMega128 with breakout board and pre-wired ISP and JTAG headers, 5V regulator, all for less than the cost of the chip alone from every local electronics store. (Though I can buy 5 of them for cheaper on ebay and maybe get them). Or 50 of them for cheaper unit cost from another part of the country.

They sell plenty of per-assembled finished kits too like the Bus Pirate for a pissy little $35. Now if you had the board manufactured and sourced the parts for this well, you could assemble, build, download the program, and in a couple of days maybe scrape in just shy of $35, but some of us buy things because we want them to work not because we want to screw around with them.

But since we're on the topic of interfacing, take a search for JTAG ARM on Sparkfun. The most expensive product that comes up in the results is less than half the price of Atmel's own JTAG interface. Can I build it for less than that? Maybe, but I don't want to build a JTAG interface, I want to use it to build something else.

So I'll take them and their rip-off prices thanks. (oh their Hakko knock-offs are cheaper than all my local sources for Hakko knock-offs as well, bought an iron from ebay once, arrived with a broken heater and no warranty, thanks but no thanks.)

Don't give up on the serial port. There are a large number of great USB to serial port adapters on the market and they're not too expensive either. Even if you really wanted to give up on the serial port the more modern cheaper usb chip programmers are just the old serial programmers with a FTDI chip to convert serial to usb. Even the super popular arduino uses the mentioned method. All that being said take a look at sparkfun.

With regret I must say to give up on the parallel port. The older true parallel ports with ECP/EPP were amazing for hobbyist hackers. Throw in a few buffers and bit bang anything you could ever need out of it. Stay away from those "usb to parallel port" adapters as they are not the gloried parallel port from the olden days and are just ports meant for older printers.

As others have pointed out, with the current prices of Android tablets from China, you'd have to be insane to even think about trying to cobble together your own solution. If you really have to make it look custom, buy a crateload of $100 (retail-price) tablets, take them apart, and mount their innards in your own enclosure. I seriously doubt whether you could buy the LCDs *alone* for what you'd pay for the whole tablet, let alone the touchscreen and everything else.

Once you've got the tablet running Android, 90% of your development work is done. Decide how you want to connect it to the rest of your system-- wifi, bluetooth, or hardwired. If you go the 'hardwire' route, you have two choices:

* the headphone jack. Forget its official purpose -- with a tiny bit of added hardware ( http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10331 -- I think this is actually a commercial version of an opensource project) and some host software, it's a serial port. Get a hold of the tablet's source, reverse engineer its schematic a bit so you can figure out what GPIO pins the 3 TRRS pins (not including ground) are connected to, and it's a a bitbang-able SPI interface.

* USB. Some actually use a crossbar chip to let you connect pins from the USB port to one of the CPU's UARTs, but don't even waste your time. Just check out the open-source schematics for "IOIO" ( ready to use reference board available from http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10748 ), which will give you more i/o options than you'll know what to do with.

Actually, there might be a third option by the time you read this. TI released a chip explicitly intended for use in Android tablets with zigbee (for home automation, industrial control, etc). If you hunt around Shenzhen and/or Silicon Valley enough, chances are you'll be able to find someone who already has a series in the design pipeline, if not manufactured and ready to buy today.

The point is, you'll never get hardware cheaper than for what you can buy off the shelf cheap Chinese Android tablets, even if you don't care about 99.9% of their capabilities. In return, you'll get a nice, ready to use host OS you can use to implement whatever higher-level display protocol you want to create. You don't have to use the tablet for anything besides an intelligent LCD host. Best of all, if you interface through something relatively vendor-agnostic, like IOIO, you won't even be tied to any single source in the future (as long as you aren't planning to disassemble them and reassemble them in your own enclosures, of course... then you'd be totally dependent upon a specific tablet).

As others have pointed out, with the current prices of Android tablets from China, you'd have to be insane to even think about trying to cobble together your own solution. If you really have to make it look custom, buy a crateload of $100 (retail-price) tablets, take them apart, and mount their innards in your own enclosure. I seriously doubt whether you could buy the LCDs *alone* for what you'd pay for the whole tablet, let alone the touchscreen and everything else.

Once you've got the tablet running Android, 90% of your development work is done. Decide how you want to connect it to the rest of your system-- wifi, bluetooth, or hardwired. If you go the 'hardwire' route, you have two choices:

* the headphone jack. Forget its official purpose -- with a tiny bit of added hardware ( http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10331 -- I think this is actually a commercial version of an opensource project) and some host software, it's a serial port. Get a hold of the tablet's source, reverse engineer its schematic a bit so you can figure out what GPIO pins the 3 TRRS pins (not including ground) are connected to, and it's a a bitbang-able SPI interface.

* USB. Some actually use a crossbar chip to let you connect pins from the USB port to one of the CPU's UARTs, but don't even waste your time. Just check out the open-source schematics for "IOIO" ( ready to use reference board available from http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10748 ), which will give you more i/o options than you'll know what to do with.

Actually, there might be a third option by the time you read this. TI released a chip explicitly intended for use in Android tablets with zigbee (for home automation, industrial control, etc). If you hunt around Shenzhen and/or Silicon Valley enough, chances are you'll be able to find someone who already has a series in the design pipeline, if not manufactured and ready to buy today.

The point is, you'll never get hardware cheaper than for what you can buy off the shelf cheap Chinese Android tablets, even if you don't care about 99.9% of their capabilities. In return, you'll get a nice, ready to use host OS you can use to implement whatever higher-level display protocol you want to create. You don't have to use the tablet for anything besides an intelligent LCD host. Best of all, if you interface through something relatively vendor-agnostic, like IOIO, you won't even be tied to any single source in the future (as long as you aren't planning to disassemble them and reassemble them in your own enclosures, of course... then you'd be totally dependent upon a specific tablet).

Perhaps that is part of the business plan. First kit you need to build is the "Chip Shooter" kit. Next, the "Stencil Solder" kit. Finally, the "Reflow Oven" is added to your list of projects. After that, the rest of the projects are cake!

Don't forget the all-important soldering iron kit! :)

You're right!
I just got an arduino from Sparkfun delivered today.

I'm old enough to remember Heathkit kits. They always had a good reputation for quality, but I remember them as being too expensive for me to afford. The Arduino is very affordable and I've found some excellent tutorials about it on YouTube.

Maybe Heathkit could package some arduino-based kits and not only help gain the interest of a new generation of tinkerers, but also bring back those who got left out when surface-mount parts pushed the DIP package into obscurity.

Sparkfun just posted an article about a clever device for visually impaired people to use to navigate with their hand. Google better leave them alone!

Er:
These new Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) displays have vibrant color, fantastic contrast, and require no backlight! The screen resolution is 128x128 pixels. The built in controller has many advanced features including various shape structures. Breakout board available below!

More displays

Wikipedia

Hell, I am pretty sure one of my old (2004?) mobile phones had a oled display...

Arduino killer? Maybe for .Net hipsters with over-rich parents...

No, not for .net hipsters, just for hyperbole-loving bloggers. Remember, for only $5 more than an Arduino UNO you can get a FEZ Panda. The ".net micro framework" has been around for several years (it was originally known as SPOT). Remember the Fossil smart watch? That's where this all started out.

Arduino killer? Maybe for .Net hipsters with over-rich parents...

No, not for .net hipsters, just for hyperbole-loving bloggers. Remember, for only $5 more than an Arduino UNO you can get a FEZ Panda. The ".net micro framework" has been around for several years (it was originally known as SPOT). Remember the Fossil smart watch? That's where this all started out.

Yep. For less then the price of the main board of those I can get something like the Sparkfun Inventors kit which is the sort of thing everybody should have.

If building little arcade machines like in the article is your thing then you can get (eg.) Arduino+Gameguino (again for less than the price of *just* their main board).

comes with classes that let you use the modules without having to go 'low level.'

Um, so does Arduino. Using a servo (or whatever) is two lines of code.

Arduino killer? Maybe for .Net hipsters with over-rich parents...

Meh, for $120 this thing is probably in trouble anyways. Though that's a shame, more stuff is always better.

And lets remember, there's already an arduino for "people who've drunk the .net koolaid". The Netduino has been around for a long time. And it's $35.

http://netduino.com/ http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10107

Alternatively, the Ubertooth One costs a lot less than $10,000 and can do this, at least in theory.

Ok, maybe I will be modded down here, but its a damn ATmega644, maybe overclocked with SNES controllers and a crap DAC hooked up. We have been doing this for years, back even on the old Pic16f84. Granted this is in color with what looks like an impressive API but for the same price you can get hooked up with a Propeller that has a hell of allot more features and even supports VGA resolutions out of box. Not to mention the video/sound timing issues you will have with this thing when you want to try to work outside the API. This is not the 2600 days where we have to watch for Vsyinc like its life or death:P

The ARM kit over at spark fun has way more features, cheaper, AND runs at 72mhz. http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10664 Even if you want to "market" this thing for beginners, an Arduino has much better support and gaggits to play with. Game programing, especially with this kind of setup, will be hard.

Sigh. Hell, even putting a 3 dollar CLPD would help the graphic performance alot on that. This whole article seems more of a sales pitch than a real project.

I have a few of DPs products. The webplatform is cheaper and more useful to me than an arduino/ethernet shield or even the new EthernetPro http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10536

Seeedstudio's fusion service is good price wise, but I will not have PCBs made through them again. Too many bad traces. Pads lift if you try to re-work them.

Slightly more expensive, http://dorkbotpdx.org/wiki/pcb_order , but I have never had a bad board and the quality is much much better.

-JC

First, SparkFun has a hugely better selection than the local Rat Shack ever did. Second, OK, so you decide to shift focus. Where are you going to get the people to staff these places? You can't throw a few ICs on a wall display and expect the mouthbreather at the front desk to be able to help with it. I'd honestly rather buy from a vending machine than deal with the kid who's trying to upsell me to a gold-plated breadboard, and would I like an iPod case with that? Finally, prices, prices, prices! The cat ate the charger to my wife's laptop. I found a replacement through the manufacturer's website for $50, and from eBay for $16. Rat Shack only stocked a universal (read: Soviet styling with crap specs) unit for $80.

So how's this supposed to work? They're not going to outstock online stores or other established local specialty shops. They don't have a competent sales force (and probably can't get one, because people worth having probably wouldn't be caught dead working there). I can't imagine that they'll ever set reasonable price points. Nah, they're dead to me - and apparently to almost everyone else. The "Radio Shack" brand is crap, and I don't think they can salvage it. I think their best best is to throw it away and launch a giant rebranding and "we used to suck and we're honest about that but we're better now" blitz.

Lilypad.

Not really that new.... Home made UAV is easy and have been built by amateurs for years now....

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9980 this works FANTASTIC as a UAV brains. spookly good.

Plus you can get a drone model that looks 100% identical to the Military version. Give a guy a couple grand and he can easily build a real UAV with PTZ camera, control with GPS waypoints and why build custom RF for comms... use a frigging cellphone, I could talk to the UAV via cellular communication channels across the country.

http://diydrones.com/ is a good start for info as well...

Careful what you wish for, you just might get it.

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/286

Can't do those kinds of things with modern PC's.

Sure you can

Then, the solution is to have a Missile Switch Cover-type http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9278 thing over the Delete key. Makes my Nuclear General fantasy more believable too.

The real and original non-smartphone is the hard wired land line, with a rotary dial.

You can always convert a rotary phone to a cell phone (or buy it if you're lazy).