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Hackable Christmas Presents?
An Anonymous Coward asks what many of you may start thinking about in another month...if you already haven't: "While sitting thru various classes..I started wondering today what I'll drop hints to people with money for what
to get me for Christmas..I want something to hack on and with..but preferably in the sub $300 dollar category. Remember the fun of hacking things like the C64 or
Spectrum or whatever? A fun home machine to hack on.. preferably not a PC (though I know you can get them in that price range) but something a little different. A cheap ARM or Mips based machine or something. Suggestions from anyone?"
Now that would be an awesome toy to hack on. You could make some pretty durable robots with that.
Add some extra hardware to allow it to understand simple commands, then you could almost make a usable home robot.
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If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Hackable toys...
Want some programable robots? how about just robot arms? then here.
Still more robot resources... (I am looking for killer robotic laser-beam eyes, if anyone has a link...)
Hackable portable DVD player, (might break the price limit though)
whoops, coffee's done...
Build one. Start poking around on Pricewatch, buy the parts, and build it. It may sound daunting if you've never done it before, but it is amazingly easy. I recently built myself another machine for $329 + shipping. Helps if you have things like an extra monitor (or KVM switch). Things are getting cheap nowadays. Celerons are less than $50, RAM is practically free.
You can get a Sun Blade 100 for less than a $1000.
The Blade 100 is a fine machine, it has a
64-bit Sun UltraSPARC-II CPU (500MHz) inside,
an IDE disk, CD-ROM drive and even a soundcard!
It makes a perfect 64-bit workstation. Don't
bother with a Sun monitor though, they are too
expensive for no good reason; you'll be better
off with a normal PC monitor.
The CPU is not particularly fast for everyday
tasks, but floating point and integer maths
performance rocks ("openssl speed" beats an
Intel PIII 600MHz by a factor of three!)
A very nice Christmas gift indeed.
Then, hack it:
We've already got various customization hacks worked out. It's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to:
Supplies are dwindling. You may want to go ahead and by one (or four) now.
One simple rule for its versus it's
I mean, there are a ton of ways to program the little guys, and it's vaguely practical too. And of course people have used them to drive robots and stuff using their onboard serial/usb port. I picked up a handspring deluxe for <$100 a week ago at Fry's.
:-)
:) ]
Here's some programming-palm linkage:
Lisp (scheme)
waba -- micro JVM (~71k), quite cool if you're into Java
extra classes and tools that work with waba, really nice data storage classes for example
a ui gen program for waba, written in waba
super waba, a bigger derivation of waba
waba community site
[yeah, I've been having lots of fun with waba
All of the above is free (beer & speech). LispMe you can actually hack code ON the pda. PocketC also allows you to hack code on the pda, but it is shareware (not _that_ expensive, about $18 iirc, the runtime is free). The java stuff you compile on your machine and HotSync across onto the target. And of course both Palm and Handspring have developer sections on their sites with tool stuff and doc sets you can nab for free.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Alright, usually I wouldn't post something like this, but you may want to wait until Tuesday afternoon before submitting your holiday wish list to your significant other.. Why you ask?
Apparently, Apple is planning to announce some "breakthrough Digital Hub" device.. There's a lot of speculation floating around, and rumors that Apple's iTunes, Quicktime, and "another unnamed project" group are responsible for whatever this thing does.. I'm going to spread anything specific, but I wouldn't be surprised if Apple releases a consumer machine based on a combination of the cube and the iMac to replace the iMac.. WHo knows what Apple's up to, but I'd pass this along so you aren't kicking yourself for turning in the list a day early..
these guys are selling $179 Celeron 433 machines with 32 megs of ram, 10.0G hard drive, a 40x cd-rom, USB mouse, and USB keyboard. Ports are USB only and it isn't very upgradable... it has no built-in ethernet or the ability to install any internal cards of any type (no pci/isa/agp slots at ALL) but it's only $179. heh. Oh, and it's got a pink handle to boot. here is a direct link to the product page.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
The Game Boy Advance and Color (especially) are inexpensive and very well documented. The GBA has an ARM processor
I can speak from experience. GBA is a joy to program for; it's much like programming an MS-DOS PC in C, as once you get your libraries done, everything else is pretty smooth. Start here for tools and documentation, and go here for hardware, specifically the MBV2 cable (load 256 KB programs directly into GBA's RAM) and the Flash Linker (load up to 128 Mbit (16 MB) programs into a flash cartridge). However, try to buy them sooner rather than later, as Nintendo will try to sue the makers out of existence, claiming that the devices are suitable "only for piracy" and ignoring the homebrew development scene.
Will I retire or break 10K?