New Toys

Well I’m back at Uni so I guess it’s time to get back to this blog and talk about things I’m doing =P The thing I’m liking most right now is playing with the new Gumstix devices. I haven’t done too much with them yet but they show a lot of promise. Who can argue with a computer roughly the size of a stick of gum (guess where the name comes from) that runs Linux and has little expansion boards to give it USB, Ethernet, audio, Bluetooth and other such abilities. Because it runs Linux, which is nice and handy, you can run most programs you’ve written straight on it (using a very helpful remote shell), obviously you have to use a cross-compiler when compiling them but that’s no problem with the handy GCC toolchain they supply. Even nicer is sticking the Python interpreter on there and doing something a little more high-level. Working on a little something for them this weekend, whether it’s possible or not I don’t yet know, more info if it works.