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Behold Gumstix; a relatively new embedded computing design coming to the rescue of hobbyists and small device manufacturers the world over. The picture to the left shows a Gumstix computing board connected to a daughterboard sporting an RJ-45 Ethernet socket. The Gumstix platform offers an embedded 400MHz PowerPC (equivalent to a AMD K6 266MHz) running off of 64MB of SDRAM with Linux 2.6.11 precompiled. The best part? It uses ridiculously little energy. It can be powered by a couple of AAA batteries for over 6 hours. Multiple other Gumstix platforms and daughterboards exist, offering USB sockets, flashcard slots, serial ports, audio processing and more. Take a look, you have nothing to lose but spare income.
If you need a little more computing horsepower and an ability to interface with commodity computer parts, look no further than the mini-ITX form factor. VIA has been steadily improving its mini-ITX boards since their inception and shows no sign of stopping. Mini-ITX boards are basically fully functional Single Board Computers (SBC) that sport onboard video, audio, ethernet, AGP and PCI slots, serial ports, USB ports, and more. Some mini-ITX boards have LVDS hookups (for LCD screens), dual onboard network controllers (to act as routers/NATs), onboard TV out (for media serving applications) and other such goodies. One of the best aspects of mini-ITX boards is that you get all of this at less than 17W of power (much less for the slower chips), providing a platform for off-the-shelf parts at low power and in a compact package. Mini-ITX boards come with chips that operate at speeds up to 1Ghz so they can handle most of today's software as well. The boards with slower chips are so power efficient and dissipate so little heat they
don't even require fans to cool them! Hobbyists have done everything from turn their Nintendo into a modern computer to building their own set-top boxes to constructing their own low-power low-cost computing cluster. An essential tool for the discerning geek.