Walter Costescu
Why is this Neat? I don\'t get it, by the time you buy a monitor, case, keyboard and mouse you\'ll be well over a few hundred dollars. You can buy a solid Netbook for as low as $150 now. This seems like a whole mess of trouble to go through for nothing
Joris van den Heuvel
Walter, you are obviously not the target market. This is not about building a complete consumer computer, this is about thinking outside the box. Stick one to the backside of a low budget TV to make a phone controlled media server, hook up 16 of these to experiment with parallel computing, build an ultragreen web server inside an Altoids mint box, use one in every room of the house to make an (inter)connected surveillance system with $5 webcams and bluetooth notification, build an autonomous network backup server in your fire safe, etc. etc. etc.
Wuahn
Re: Walter - Your comment is shortsighted. We all use dozens of devices in a typical day that are technically computers but don\'t necessarily have screens, keyboards, etc. If nothing else, it\'s a very inexpensive media player add-on for your television (think Western Digital or Roku).
Bede Key
You don\'t need a monitor, it plugs into your TV... and you can get a budget USB mouse and keyboard for less than USD 10.00 or a wireless combined keyboard-touch pad for USD 30.00... most people in developed countries who don\'t have a computer at home have a TV and in developing countries there are a growing number of people with access to one... it is neat and I do get it!!!
HerrDrPantagruel
The other day I was researching cheap tiny computers to run an always on web server. Tired of leaving my 300 watt computer on just to have my music available on Subsonic server. This could do that and draw only a few watts. So that\'s just one person\'s little pet application where you need a small amount of pc power but don\'t want to dedicate a whole expensive electricity hogging computer to it. And of course if you actually had such hardware I\'m sure people would develop a lot more applications for them.
Alonzo Riley
I would love to figure out how to use this to control a whole lot of lighting! You could build this into some sophisticated chandeliers!
Mr Stiffy
Hmmmmmmmmmm creates a terrible itch, one just has to scratch, does.
Just after I invented the wheel, the internal combustion engine, powered flight, the atom bombs, space flight and the time machine and taught Einstein everything he knew, I also created the first lines of home PC\'s that people actually had to buy in bits and solder the parts onto.
\"Oooooooooo 68Kb of RAM! Awesome!\"
These are brilliant things....
And it\'s value enough to do great things with, and nothing to suicide over if you get it seriously wrong in the process.
Mindbreaker
Seems like it could be good for robot projects as well. The usual PIC microcontroller chips are not very fast and in other ways limited. This, with software could make it so you can program it without using another computer and without paying a fortune or being limited because of power requirements.
mikewax
devices like this can bridge the digital divide. parents can go to a thrift shop and get the peripheral stuff. they can use shared wifi to get basic internet, and in third world countries it would be a great educational tool.
Richard Edmonds
Kids don't want to become hackers or learn to use Linux, kids want instant gratification, easy game consoles, Apple computers, iPads and iPods/iPhones.