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Sun open sources doohickeys

Anonymous Coward

As usual Sun prices it out of the market 

Posted Wednesday 30th January 2008 10:24 GMT

Linux

4Meg of flash, 3D accelerometer and 6 analog ports? That would be cool to play with on my motorcycle as sort of a poor man's data logger.

$300-$550? Oh never mind, then... there are purpose-built ruggedized off-the-shelf units for cheaper, and my Nokia N800 didn't set me back that much!

Rob

for robotics 

Posted Wednesday 30th January 2008 11:49 GMT

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i think this could be pretty neat for hobby robotics, depending on size and power consumption etc.. not sure how it's going to measure up against the gumstix boards though.

http://gumstix.com/

Seán

Lets see how much the spurious units are 

Posted Wednesday 30th January 2008 13:01 GMT

Once our chums in Taiwan get cracking on these the unit cost should plummet after all its just a jazzed up game controller.

Michael

battery power 

Posted Wednesday 30th January 2008 13:01 GMT

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you're having a laugh. Java for a battery powered device to flash a LED?

I'll stick to 8-bit uC's for now and C/assembler

Anonymous Coward

Platform for a network camera 

Posted Wednesday 30th January 2008 22:24 GMT

Black Helicopters

So could I plug in a 640x480 60fps USB camera into the port, and have it stream video over an internal web server? Probably not, but if so, it might make a good platform for network web cameras.

Currently a decent wireless network web cam is over $300 USD (Axis 207W)

Nexox Enigma

Re: Platform for a network camera 

Posted Wednesday 30th January 2008 23:45 GMT

This radio on this thing isn't wifi, that is to say 802.11, but 802.15.4 "ZigBee," which forms a low bandwidth (~250kbit) mesh network. So not terribly useful for wireless cameras.

Definitely neat stuff though. The value isn't in the hardware so much, but the development tools. Plus you know that the hardware works, so you don't find yourself debugging hardware and software simultaneously.

Probably not quite worth that price for anything that I'd want to do though...