New XBMC Port Promises ARM-Powered HD In the Palm of Your Hand

Engadget has a recent teaser video promising HD content via XBMC running on a 600MHz Beagleboard. This could mean great things for home theater putterers, with the Beagleboard tipping the scales at a modest $150 and the ability to fit in the palm of your hand. Already running on everything from MIDs to AppleTVs and now moving to ARM-powered devices like the Beagleboard, it looks like XBMC needs to be renamed from "Xbox Media Center" to "ubiquitous media center."

Comments

Why do I have to wait 30 seconds for Post Preview?

[electrosoccertux]

It's hardly even worth actively participating in discussion anymore...

Other hardware like this

[BitZtream]

I've been waiting for an excuse to ask slashdot this question.

What is a good resource for finding cheap, small, not overly feature rich hobbiest boards like this one?

I've done some work with ATmega microcontrollers. Went so far as to create my on little multitasking OS from the ground up based on some knowledge I gained from FreeRTOS. I enjoyed the process and it taught me a great deal about the difficulties associated with task switching. I quit when I realized that I REALLY wanted an MMU, or at least some memory protection.

I've written an MMC controller, a serial console for it, made my own little FS, none of it impressive to anyone with more than a slight clue about this stuff, but it reminds me of reading the notes from Linus about how Linux started out, and for me its a fun time and nice distraction from my day job of writing applications on top of a real OS.

I would prefer an x86 based board, anything 386 or better would be awesome, but it doesn't have to be. In fact since I've yet to see a good 386 simulator/debugger, or at least nothing that to me compares to the stuff that Atmel provides, I'm more than open to any other processor, I'm not tied to anything as I'm simply not that good to make a big difference.

What I would like to find:
A complete board that I can plugin in and debug, relatively cheap would be great.
Debugging ability and supporting software is most important, I use a MacBook so OS X support is ideal, but I've got VMs with Windows and FreeBSD, and installing Linux is more than acceptable for the purpose if need be. I really apprecate the simulator and debuggers the AVRStudio for Windows has, a copy of it for something more powerful would be ideal. The AVR32 is probably the closest I'll get to that, but it doesn't seem that I can really use AVR32s on my on hardware real easy. I can get a get a dev board for it, but throwing the chips onto something custom requires more effort than I would prefer to put into it.
Processor doesn't really matter, x86 would be nice since its probably got the largest base of reference code, but pretty much anything capable of running Linux is fine since I can use that as a reference. Linux is not a requirement as I won't be running it, it just makes a good reference to have handy when the docs for the hardware aren't all that clear or I don't really understand a particular concept.
Onboard IO is pretty much a must. Doesn't need VGA or anything, serial is plenty good enough for what I'll use it for, but some sort of digital output is a requirement so I can control stuff. I don't need a DAC as I can simulate one good enough to do audio as long as I have a digital pin of some sort to work with.
An ADC would be nice.
SPI would be really nice as I'm used to working with it and it makes MMC interfacing much easier.
64k would be more than enough ram, but more is certainly acceptable. I've been shoving 4 processes in to 2k of RAM, and if I have a MMU that supports virtual addressing I care even less, as thats really what I'd like to learn next.
Speed isn't an issue, a 12mhz ATmega was plenty of my toying around so far, I'm not designing an end user OS, just playing.
Onboard clock would be ideal, as I never have properly got an AVR to run on an external clock so thats obviously a concept I don't grasp properly and I'm lazy so figuring it out slows me down.

So fellow geeks, where do I look to find this sort of thing, or what do you guys have experience with that you would recommend me looking into? Something just slightly more powerful than the your typical 8bit Atmel or PIC microcontroller would be the target.

Hell, I don't even have to have a board, I just don't want to get a CPU that requires a bunch of external support circuitry, something microcontrollerish that I can just hookup some power to and start interfacing. I dont mind adding some minor stuff but I don't want to have to spend 3 days working up a board design, then debug the hardware just to get to where I can run some code, otherwise I'd throw an x86 processor on a board myself.