brainwagon

If anyone has been following this blog for any period of time, you know I’m a bit of a gizmo freak. It’s not that I have the latest and greatest cell phone or PDA. Actually, I’m pretty much a cheapskate, and I don’t like tossing huge sums of money just following the latest trendy thing. I do, however, like to find bargain equipment that I can use to do something interesting (in other words, hacking gadgets). A couple of possible future projects have crossed my Inbox this week, and I thought I’d write them down here so I can remember them, and also pass them on to you.

Slashdot ran an article on a New $149 NetBSD Single Board Computer Port. The TS-7200 is an ARM processor based board which draws about two watts. It has 10/100 Ethernet, a CompactFlash slot, 32M of SDRAM and runs at 200Mhz. Cute, small, and low power, the perfect sort of thing to run a small embedded webserver. You could hook some external drives via the USB port.

In the comments, a reader mentioned the Linksys NSLU2 network storage device. It’s a tiny little computer designed to convert USB drives into network storage. It has two USB2 ports and an Ethernet port. The idea is simple: plug in the drives, configure the device via its embedded webserver and voila! You have shared network storage. It costs a low $80, and most importantly, runs Linux and is hackable. Check out nslu2-linux.org for more information. As an example, the polkadot ninja runs the thttpd daemon on one of these little boxes. Cool!

Buffalo Technologies has a cute gadget called the Kuro Box which is a power PC box with space for an internal hard drive. It costs about $160, a bit more than the NSLU2, but since you can mount an ordinary drive internally, the overall cost should be comparable.

Three neat boxes, all capable of running a webserver.

I wonder if you could actually run WordPress on them…