uCsimm News

The uClinux guys have announced that they are finished testing the uCsimm and are now taking pre-orders. For US$175, you get a SIMM-sized unit with a 16MHz Dragonball processor (the very one used in the Palm Pilots), 2MB of Flash, 8MB of RAM, and integrated 10baseT. Since it can apparently drive a QVGA LCD, I guess it might be good for my fridge? :) uClinux is Linux without an MMU and more info can be found at the uClinux.org site.

Comments

I can think of *PLENTY* of things to do with this.

[torpor]

This thing is awesome. I can't wait until they ship, I've placed an order for 2 of them for instant prototype work on some things I've been meaning to work on for years.

The fact that it has built-in ethernet is a *major* plus, in my opinion.

Imagine a small terminal that you can plug into your network and get statistics, information from around your network, instantly.

You don't need your PC to be up and running, you just have this small device sitting on a pedestal on your desk with a 320x200 screen, scrolling information from your network, displaying bar graphs of system activity, etc.

Since it runs Linux, we could build a minimal web server for it, so that you can administer it by sticking it on the network and pointing your browser at it.

I'm going to build something like this when I get my prototype uCSimm boards, and I think I will call it the GeekClock. It'll have a few modes:

Clock mode (dial/digital face, etc)
Netmon interface - display stats from various netmon packages on your different machines.
News scroller - slashdot headlines on your desk!
IRC interface - see who is in your favourite #channel!

etc.

Sort of like a dedicated push client... imho the problem with the whole push phenomenon a few years back was that it required your PC not do much else - if you can have it on your desk and just look at it now and then as you work, it seems to me that this is a better way of doing it.

And since it'll be an Open Source project, we can make the GeekClock totally rock! Got a module you want to write, simply dl the code, add it, and away we go.

This way I can finally turn off all the stuff that runs in the background on my main systems, and I don't need to interrupt what I'm doing to keep an eye on things - the GeekClock stands on its pedestal on my desk, telling me whats going on with my network.

That's just one idea.

Another idea I had was to add a MIDI interface to it, and use it as a MIDI protocol analyzer - since I write music software for a living, this would be useful to me.

I guess the point is that there are a whole bunch of things that I could do with a uCSimm when I get one, and I can't wait!

If anyone is interested in the GeekClock project, don't hesitate to mail me. I'd sure like to colaborate with other people that are interested in putting this nifty device to use...