Homebrew Microcontroller Laptop, Made of Wood 159
Brietech writes "This is a homebrew laptop project based on a Picaxe microcontroller. It has 16kb of RAM, 256kb of storage, sound and a self-hosted development environment! It has a simple CLI, file-system, 'EMAXE' text editor and a programming language called 'Chris#.' Oh, and yes, it runs Linaxe."
Seems kinda low-spec as a starting point (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know much about the PICaxe, but for $8 (single unit qtys) you can buy an 80MHz MIPS microcontroller [microchip.com] with a lot going for it. [microchip.com] This one has 32KB of onboard RAM and 512K of flash. [microchip.com]
Re:Already down. (Score:2, Interesting)
what's all this then (Score:3, Interesting)
Is Slashdot turning into Hack a Day [hackaday.com] today, or what?
Re:Pretty fast! (Score:3, Interesting)
There seems to be a very helpful community [google.com] willing to help, and it seems to be a fantastic product to learn with.
Re:Pretty fast! (Score:3, Interesting)
OK. So you're criticizing someone for not being as lazy as you? Way to go. This is a new level to revelling in laziness.
I remember fondly one of my udergrad design classes in which we built an 8088 system from scratch by wire-wrapping the crystal, interrupt controller, memory controller, etc. and then programmed it to make some kind of control system. I made an infusion pump controller.
The professor was a surly drunk, but I learned a lot in the class.
It may be a "waste of time" but I'm sure he'll benefit.
Re:People use microcontrollers in homebrewing? (Score:1, Interesting)
There are some college/university students (equivalent, depending of the country) who have build computer controlled distillers. These projects work well as self teaching tools for process engineering ;).