ARM Microcontroller Development System

Thanks to freecycle yesterday I managed to get my hands on an embedded development board, designed to help people write applications for PDAs and the like. It came with Windows CE circa 1998 on a flash chip that I finally managed to get it to boot off of, which I'm typing on right now, to then copy it onto my laptop to post.

It was a long and painful 4 hours of trying different jumpers on the 20-some-odd pairs of pins before I got anything more than my power supply fan spinning.

Ignoring the fact that it is pretty much useless thanks to the fact that every time you reboot it it loses all your changes (including calibrating the touch screen! #@$^#^), it is a very cute systemto play with. Nice little 5" touch screen (640x480) and an 8" keyboard which is a little awkward to type on with more than two fingers. It even has a little pezo buzzer that clicks every time you press a key.

It also has a ton of pretty cool stuff about it. It has a MultiMediaCard slot (which is how I save data between reboots) a PC card slot, an RJ-45 jack, 3 serial jacks, and even a video capture card. Granted most of this doesn't work without writing your own software for it so I'll just enjoy typing into my text files.

It also has a liquid crystal display on the board itself that has never displayed anything and a keyboard that doesn't have every letter and the ones it does have aren't even right. (k=tab v=` m=\ i=x etc etc)