The Clever Monkey

Embedded Device Zoo

While cleaning up my work area today I moved a bunch of electronics stuff around into different storage boxes. Since I had most of the turnkey embedded hobby systems out as part of that reorganization, I decided to take a photo of them.

Embedded Device Zoo

Clockwise from lower-left:

  1. Texas Instruments MSP-eZ430U-based Chronos programmable digital watch (with wireless and direct-connection programming dongles)
  2. STMicroelectronics STM32F0DISCOVERY STM32F0 Cortex-M0 kit (I think I got this one for free just by asking for it)
  3. Arduino Duemilanove ATmega328p (with a well-hacked Adafruit bootloader)
  4. Texas Instruments eZ430-F2013 USB development system (which I got for free when I went to a TI event)
  5. BeagleBone Black revision B, currently running either Debian or Arch ARM (which I received in trade for a guitar amp)

Not shown:

  1. An Arduino-based Triggertrap photography tool (a Kickstarter reward which doesn’t even seem to be a product anymore)
  2. A LEGO MINDSTORMS RCX brick that I usually hack on with my own fork of NQC

I was originally going to turn the BeagleBone into a low-power edge box running Arch Linux, but that project was easier with some donated hardware and DD-WRT. I think the plan is to turn it into a BitScope device once that is officially supported.

The Chronos watch I’ve tweaked heavily, but the irony is I never wear a watch, so it sits in a box. It does occur to me now that the watch guts could easily be turned into a remote weather datalogger. So let’s put a pin in that idea.

The Arduino is currently a KIM UNO KIM-1 (incomplete) software-only emulator as discussed earlier. I’d like to get back to getting the KIM-1 RRIOT emulation more complete.

The other two I’ve run the equivalent of “Hello World” on (i.e., made an LED flash). I’ve had idle thoughts about turning one or the other into a little bike computer of some sort.

So, not exactly bursting with embedded activity over here, but a respectible collection that I’ve actually spent some time with. I might even have working toolchains for the majority of these devices.