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The NetBSD Toaster
kv9 writes "Finally after many, many yeas of running on everything-but-your-toaster NetBSD is there too. Technologic Systems has made a toaster that is controlled by NetBSD and powered by one of their ARM boards, the TS-7200. Everything is controlled through sysctl, there are LEDs that show you what is going on, the toaster can play MP3s while it fries the bread and even has Apache/PHP installed. More information in the press release [pdf warning] and on this running NetBSD on the TS-7200 page."
The BTOD? Black Toast of Death?
I guess their server is toast.
I'm a little confused by this story.
Did Netcraft just confirm that my toaster is dead?
This might be appropriate for a single guy on a budget, but we all know that scaling problems will keep this from being deployed in any serious environment.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
"...it fries the bread and even has Apache/PHP installed."
that will teach them to run their webserver on a toaster!
This just proves how ahead of its time Amiga was. The Video Toaster came out in 1990. Now, 15 years later, someone finally puts another system on a toaster and it doesn't even have video! Maybe another 15 and the world will catch up.
...the year of BSD on the countertop!
Now, if only NetBSD ran a garbage-disposal, we could say that NetBSD runs everything and the kitchen sink!
I don't fear computers, I fear the lack of them. -I. Asimov
I'd like to see this extended to a combined toaster/jelly-jet printer. Delicious toast printed to order with the image of your choice. Of course it would require a bread feeder that could do cut slice or continuous loaf.
Th is one talked.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. What do you think this is?" he asked. One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The engineer replied, "Using a 4-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from white to black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16 element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. By next week, I can show you a working prototype." The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand morecapabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years." "With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes." "The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself.' The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs." "Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too." "We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message 'Booting UNIX v. 8.3' appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook." "Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. A 1 GHz Intel Pentium IV with 256 MB of memory, a 6 GB hard disk, and a Flat Panel monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multi-tasking, object-oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a 4-bit microcontroller!" The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.