Hack-A-Day reader Bogdan Marinescu does a better job summarizing his project than I ever could. You can get his source code, schematics and more details by following the “read” link.

This project is a truly stand-alone development platform. What does that mean? Well, you plug-in a PS/2 keyboard, a 320×240 LCD, and start typing code. The code is written in LUA. The compiler and interpreter for LUA run from the microcontroller. The code also contains a small editor (for the code), support for FAT12/FAT16 on MMC/SD cards, support for remote connections and a new FLASH-friendly embedded file system. The platform is ‘self-reproducible’, i.e. you can transfer code from one platform to another. The LCD/keyboard/MMC are optional, so you can have a big ‘development’ platform with everything in it and a lot of bare ‘production’ platforms that ‘reproduce’ their code directly from the development platform. A M16C microcontroller and an external 512K SRAM chip are all that is required to build the bare platform, the other components are just for interfacing different peripherals. Hope you’ll like the idea. The code is 95% functional, but it needs some more work and a lot more testing.

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