Tom Gardner wrote:

I just bought a starter kit to play with after just being introduced to
them. I wish I has seen these earlier, I can think of a bazillion
things to do. But, I'll just flash a LED for now. Too bad the book is
in a 3pt font!
Actually, the Beagle Bone is a better deal. You get a full Linux system,
with all the networking features available. It also has 2 200 MHz 32-bit
microcontrollers that have about a dozen pins brought out for each, and
shared memory to the Arm CPU. These are great for bit-banging odd
protocols, generating step pulses or some other thing that isn't directly
supported by on-chip peripherals.

I updated a laser photoplotter I built about 16 years ago, using a DMA card
on the ISA bus, on a Windows 95 computer. Not only could the
microcontroller emulate the DMA card, but it could also unpack run-length
encoded data in real time. File sizes of 1000x1000 DPI raster images get
big, so compessing them is really nice.

I've used various versions of the Beagles for network appliance devices
before, and they are great. You can use Glade to develop the user
interfaces graphically.

Jon