I found a fascinating open source hardware and software project called Arduino that has a surprising amount of sophistication and peripherals available for it. and a seemingly easy to use software development environment.
One of the options is to hook it up to blue tooth or 802.11 wireless modules. I'm thinking that I might be able to take the 802.11 or blue tooth modules (802.11 module supports TCP/IP so it is the obvious choice) and if an SD card can also be utilized I might be able to implement a cheap hardware device that can be placed in your pocket and gather/propagate TEOTWAWKI Net completely unattended. you could then sync it with your laptop or other larger system later.
I have no idea if the Arduino is capable of anything as complex as TN but it was enough to get me thinking. Eventually I would like to implement the network on smart phones and sophisticated PDA devices but open source hardware platforms like this really open a lot of cool possibilities.
I just spent a couple of hours looking at information about the platform and the microcontroller chip it is based on and it may be a bit too simple to do what I want. however It is still quite capable and flexible for small projects. I really want to see a lot more work being done in the open source hardware area. the amount of new and innovative hardware and software projects that could be built really is unlimited with completely open hardware to build on.
What i would really like to see is a project very much like Arduino but targeted at much larger scale applications. Something that is about the same size as the Arduino and has the ability to plug in multiple I/O boards with storage, wifi, etc. as well as exporting various pins you would find on a micro controller. It would also need to be able to run a decent real time OS (hopefully something POSIX like or even a small version of Linux). I could do a lot with a device like that.
In a nutshell what I would really like to see the hardware hackers come up with is a low cost general purpose embedded computer platform that is small enough to fit in someones pocket and run off of batteries. With enough CPU horsepower and features to run complex wireless network applications. I don't even need a display or a keypad but a modular system would make this easy to add. If the open source hardware hackers ever come up with such a thing I will be very happy.
I'm still tempted to buy some of these kits and see just how far I can push things though. (If only I had unlimited time!)
Ohhhh Yeahhhh! check this out: http://blogs.leaflabs.com/2009/
This looks like it may well just fit the bill for what I'm wishing for I will be following the development of this project very closely. My main focus is to get the UNIX version of TN working as well as I possibly can before I go off on porting to other platforms embedded or otherwise. but once that goal is accomplished I will be getting some kits and exploring the possibilities.
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