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Hackable Hardware?

Posted by Cliff on from the D-I-Y dept.

Cédric Adjih asks: "I wanted to build my own small-and-cool RISC box (such as an Itsy), or even much smaller, in order to control self-made robots, or other simple homebrew electronic circuits. But the retail-price for individual electronic components is often way too high ($1000 for a RISC evaluation board, $150 for a RISC processor, $1000 for PC/104 with 486 card, ...). Since there is a trend towards more and more powerful and cheap electronic devices (calculators, PDA, agendas, Inet boxes,...), the only rational way is to buy one, and to hack it. But this require internal hardware information, and also a way to interface with circuits (such as via I2C). Does anyone have information about WWW pages describing such hardware or such hacking? An example candidate for the low-end would be the TI-89 (68000 at 10Mhz, 188K ram, 384 K Flash, easy interface with PC, LCD display ; at $150+. Hard to beat that by buying the individual components...), but there might be better, or more powerful... "

2 of 12 comments (clear)

  1. PC/104s aren't that expensive by Nelson · · Score: 3
    They are much cheaper. You should be able to find a pentium-166 class PC/104 from Jumptec for under $500
    Try here


    Buy the time you get the modules you want it may be in the thousand dollar range, VGA lcds aren't so cheap either. Test kits aren't cheap either but you should be able to find a PC/104 with VGA out and super I/O for under $500 and then it's just a matter of putting it all together. If you go embedded and dump the super I/O you can probably get them for half that but you'll need a test/developers kit to work on it.


    To be honest, with the low costs of those machines, I'm surprized there haven't been more hacking efforts. You could easily crank out an MP3 juke with those for you car (all you'd need is the PC/104 and an audio module and a drive) Or little firewall bricks or all sorts of cool things can be done with them cheap.

  2. Palm IIIe might be better by dutky · · Score: 3

    The Palm IIIe, which costs about $150, has a 16MHz Dragonball processor (MC68K derivative) along with 2MB of RAM and a couple of serial ports (one of which is an IrDA port). There is a fair amount of hacking information available on the web for the Palm devices, and you can get a stripped down version of Linux for it.

    The only big drawback I can see, for the IIIe specifically, is that it doesn't have any flash memory, so you can't burn your own software into it, as you can with the IIIx or IIIxe. Still, you could always write your software for PalmOS, since there is a fair amount of information and software available for that.

    If you are just going to doing robotics projects, however, you may want to look at some of the single chip microcontrollers, like the 683xx, 68HC12 or 68HC16 families from Motorola. Some of those have both RAM and EEPROM built-in, as well as a handfull of usefull peripherals (serial ports, ADC, DAC, etc.) and cost only a few (to a few tens of) dollars each.