Archive for April, 2007

Picotux – The smallest Linux running machine

Saturday, April 14th, 2007

It seems that Picotux is the world’s smallest Linux running computer.
Its sizes are 35mm×19mm×19mm. Inside there’s an ARM7 CPU running at 55 MHz and an uClinux kernel 2.4.27 + Busybox 1.0.
Being this small, you might think the communication/connectivity part would have to suffer, but that’s not true.
It also has an 10/100 Mbps half/full duplex Ethernet and a serial port with up to 230.400 baud.
You may want to check the full list of technical specifications here.

The price may vary from ~100Euros (the cheapest) and it can go up to ~240Euros for advanced features. Aditional features can be bought as well.

Here’s a picture of it. What do you think?

linux

Digital Drawing Board

Monday, April 9th, 2007

This is what I call innovation. Back in my day we used a blackboard and chalk but it seems that future generations won’t have to get their hands dirty. This digital drawing board it’s not only clean and easy to use, as you can se it acts as a environment with predefined rules. Besides being cool this is a huge help when teaching physics classes or when you need simple animations to show your point.

Though it might take a while until we see this kind of hardware in the schools near you, it’s sure that technologies like this or derived from it are going to make our life better. What do you say about it?