Bearfruit

I’m getting excited to see embedded Linux showing up in so many places. The reason I think it’s cool is because very often it can be hacked to do something far cooler than the original intent. By hack, I mean disassembled, modified or improved in some unexpected way.

The Kindle is an expensive e-book reader that has an innovative screen and form factor. It also has a cellular data connection so that you can download books and apparently surf some websites. I did not realize that it is based on Linux.

I’ve been playing with the Arduino board. I’m going to write an article for an electronics mag (already talked to the editor and he gave the go-ahead). No guarantees anything will get published of course. It’s a fun system, but I really wish I could get my hands on an embedded Linux system that was compact and had some free GPIO’s. The NGW100 is nice and I’ll probably get one, but I could see wanting a USB host controller and/or the ability to use wifi.

If the kindle were truly hackable it’d be a pretty slick system. Except that it costs $399 of course. In the grand scheme of things, I’d probably wanna hack the iphone before the kindle I guess. (And before that an android phone).