Behold the Rascal Micro. It’s running embedded Linux and has a dual-row of pin headers which probably seem pretty familiar. The idea here is to bring Arduino hardware (ie: shields) to a party with a powerful web server.
The image above is the beta version of the hardware. What’s being shown off in a recent Engadget demo is a version that slides two USB ports in between the barrel jack and the NIC. This makes it easy to jump over to wireless with the use of a USB dongle, or you can figure out what other peripherals you want to include in your project.
The novelty here is that the web server included a built-in editor. So not only can it serve you a webpage to control hardware or display sensor status, but it will let you edit the interface without needing to reflash anything.
The price rings in somewhere around $100-150, and like the popular Raspberry Pi board, you can’t get your hands on it right now.
Wouldn’t this be easy to do with a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino Uno? It would be a lot cheaper too. Still a cool device though.
I am currently in the process of doing something like that as we speak, I just need the Raspberry Pi first, for now I am using a Ethernet shield and a full PC in the near future.
But as of now I am working on a simple framework to pull and push data to a Arudino via a browser.
I currently have dynamic updating graphs.
Don’t have anything to share just yet, but plan on putting it on github soon.
See also:
http://www.engadget.com/2012/05/21/hands-on-with-the-electric-imp-at-maker-faire-video/
http://electricimp.com/developers/devkits.php
I’m not sure if my comment got killed off by wordpress sign-in, or if its awaiting moderation (I don’t see it), but I was saying, this is way less useful and way more expensive than the electric imp.
Uh, oops. That was not meant to be a reply here. I see *that* comment awaiting moderation. Turns out if you post a reply comment, the comment box still stays as a reply. Smart…
Any idea how long it takes to boot?
Another win for Artisan’s Asylum in Somerville, MA!
Congrats to Brandon on putting this out.
how do you compare this with Raspberry or cheap netbook from China cost almost the same price?
Raspberry Pi available now???? Everytime I check, none is in stock. I just did a quick check on ebay, and one has 27 bids with 33 minutes left. The current offer? $135
I dont know what you mean, i ordered my R-Pi from Element 14, when it was first announced, and it just arrived. Why are you stalking Ebay for one, when you can order one from Element 14 and get it in a month’s time, even less now they’ve stepped up production…
Wow, this looks way less useful and more expensive than an electric imp. Ethernet? How about wifi. And they even have an Arduino board for the imp.
http://electricimp.com/developers/devkits.php
I actually met with Hugo, the CEO of electric imp, at their headquarters today and talked to them about how the imp could be integrated into 3D printers. They’re super hobbyist-friendly and they have a wicked product. I played with one of their sensors hooked up to some RGB christmas lights, and the latency was amazing – everything routes through amazon’s servers and back, and there was seriously like 100ms latency. And then he told me the imp in the sensor was actually sleeping for 50ms at a time, so it could probably be less!
Seriously, check this video out:
http://www.engadget.com/2012/05/21/hands-on-with-the-electric-imp-at-maker-faire-video/
Thanks for the link, that looks pretty intriguing.
One question: does anyone know what kind of clock frequency the processor runs at? It’s kind of sad that the Hackaday article doesn’t link to any specs on the Rascal, and I couldn’t find any on the Imp site either – all it says is it’s a Cortex-M3.
If there are full specs, they’re well hidden.
The only thing I could find before giving up is that it contains a AT91SAM9G20, which can potentially run at 400mhz.
But I get the impression that this is geared towards people who don’t care about specs, price, or programming.
What ever happened to the beaglebone?
You can still buy them, there’s still a sizable community behind it, and they’re still pretty awesome. Though I think it would gain more popularity if TI would subsidize the price down by $20 and advertise more.
This is quite cool hardware and the size is also quite right (5×10 cm).
I’m wondering if it would be possible to make this even smaller and have screw terminals instead of Ethernet connector and PoE support.
Then it would be easy to use it inside electrical outlets.
I’ve never clicked through so many pages without being able to read the hardware specs of something.
For anyone digging through the fluff, this is an Atmel AT91SAM9G20 400 MHz w/64mb ram.
I keep hoping that something like this will come along and knock Arduino off the hill.
Problem is $150+ dollars is just a little too much. If I can buy an Intel Atom based motherboard for $69 that will run any flavor of linux I want.
I know this has I/O and is low power and bla bla. But the bottom line is, if I’m doing a one-off project then price and ease of use are the only factors.
We need tiny linux boards for $39-$59.
Have a look at the Olinuxino. It uses a comparable ARM chip except at ~500Mhz and 64MB ram but its only $35 with shipping on ebay.