Just a follow up to my other post on Friday, gumstix has released their Robostix expansion board ($50 USD). It can be programmed directly as it has an Atmel ATMega128 embedded processor, or it can be programmed using the Gumstix platform.

Over the weekend I played around with a friends Atmel dev kit, a STK500, and got some LEDs blinking using a ATMega128. I'm pretty sure this is my first time I wrote any working embedded code. As I suspected it was all about bit masking "ports", where each port has 8 bits and each bit controls a seperate pin out. The chip itself is smaller than my thumb nail. With 64 pins in such a small package the idea of soldering this chip to a PCB is pretty daunting. But I'm excited about embeded programming, it's challenging and the results are only limited by your imagination.


For all you .Net developers there are PC/104 embeddeds capable of running Windows ce.net, such as the PCM-5335 which uses a AMD Geode chip. But at 2.0A@ +5V this type of platform would put way too much draw on my platforms Li-Po batteries. If I had greater power supply it might be different. But I'd like to get a dev kit for the Geode down the road and see what I can break.