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Craft
Craft is a demo running on its own minimalistic demo platform. The demo platform is based on an ATmega88 microcontroller. Having successfully built a soundchip out of a microcontroller together with my friends in kryo , I wanted to tackle the greater challenge of generating a realtime video signal along with the sound. This is the result:I wrote: "Shame on you. Chumby 'guts' for $139 when Chumby One (with the same guts) was about to be released for $100? There's no way you didn't know that was coming."
Chumby Guts - Maker Shed Exclusive
An ambitious group of hardware hackers have taken the fundamental building blocks of computing and turned them inside out in an attempt to make PCs significantly more efficient. The group has created a motherboard prototype that uses separate modules, each of which has its own processor, memory and storage. Each square cell in this design serves as a mini-motherboard and network node; the cells can allocate power and decide to accept or reject incoming transmissions and programs independently. Together, they form a networked cluster with significantly greater power than the individual modules.
Modular Motherboard
Magic-1 is a microcoded minicomputer running at 4.09 Mhz and is in the same ballpark as an old 8086 in performance and capabilities. It supports user and supervisor modes, address translation via a hardware page table, six external interrupts and up to 8 MB of memory (currently has 4 MB). Each process has up to 128 Kbytes of addressing, broken down as 32 pages (2K) of data and 32 pages of code mapped via the page table onto the 23-bit physical memory and device spaces. Here's a picture of it running before the enclosure arrived. The physical address bus is 22 bits (though effectively 23 because of a signal line which selects between memory and device spaces). The data bus is 8 bits wide, and internal CPU data paths are 16 bits.
Computer made of logic gates
Macintosh for < $240
MSI is a company known mostly for its PC components. They recently jumped into the netbook bandwagon with just about every other major pc manufacturer. Their Eee like machine, the MSI Wind, ended up being an extremely popular little laptop. Along with the laptop they made a not too well known desktop with roughly the same dimensions as a ream of printer paper.
Building Your Own Web Server
Craig is a degreed hardware engineer who, until recently, had been writing large-scale Java applications. He can be contacted at calhjh@gmail.com . To lower my energy consumption and carbon footprint, I decided about a year ago to build a low-power web server for use in hosting my personal website. Previously I had used an old desktop PC as a host, but knew it consumed way more energy (100× even without a monitor) than what I had in mind. My quest began with the design of a web server based on a 20-MHz 8-bit PIC microcontroller (this design was published in the July 2008 issue of Nuts and Volts ( www.nutsvolts.com ).This companion site contains the software tools, project materials, and lectures necessary to build all the hardware and software systems described in the book, as well as a proposed series of lectures. This material is aimed at students, instructors, and self-learners.
The Elements of Computing Systems
Japanese geeks offered smaller-than-Eee little laptop
Japanese laptop maker Kohjinsha has rolled out a pair of Eee PC challengers, taking on the elfin sub-notebook with a pair of similarly sized tablet-style units incorporating 80GB hard drives. Kohjinsha's SA5KXO8AL: watch out, Eee PC Fortunately, neither the SA5KXO8AL and SA5KXO8FL run Windows' Tablet PC Edition - they come pre-loaded with XP Home Edition instead. The operating system runs on the machines' 500MHz AMD Geode LX800 processor, which is backed with 512MB of 333MHz DDR 2 memory and said HDD.