This controller will be designed for installation into an Eee 700-series netbook to serve the following purposes:

1. Provide a communications interface to I2C, SPI and UART devices over USB
2. Control power switching to various internally-mounted low-current (~0-25mA) and high-current (~25-125mA) devices.
3. Provide non-USB-Host 5V power to the high-current USB devices through high-current SPST switches so as not to overload the USB Bus (Update: This will be done by off-board MOSFETs. There just wasn't enough room on the board to allow it to still fit in the space allocated for the MDC1.5.

Purpose:

I've been looking to get EleHack.com on the road for a while now. I was looking at making a site for everything from basic circuits to interfacing sensors with microcontrollers, etc... Basically, building blocks for circuits, so if someone needed to (for example) look up how to make a 555 timer circuit, there would be a page for that, or how to interface an LCD display to an Arduino, there would be a page for that. Even things like how to interface triggers to DSLRs. Really, anything electronic-related.

Since SparkFun Electronics announced Free Day on January 7, 2010, I figured I'd start looking at what exactly I could get for $100. (I'll only link the big items for risk of being called Spam by Googlebot.) This list is a work in progress, I'll add more as I search.

Here's a quick tip if you find yourself typing a lot of accented letters, etc. We're going to assign our keyboard a Compose key.

In Kubuntu, do the following:

I scored a mega-deal on eBay a while back for this EVEm mini-ITX computer with an EVEm DC/DC power supply, in a generic mini-ITX case.

The EVEm has a VIA C3 Samuel2 600MHz "1GigaPro" CPU and a VIA VT133 Chipset.

I added the specified maximum of 256MB of 133Mhz SDRAM, and am currently using a 3.5" 6.4Gb hard drive.

I got this LCD screen free with one of my computer-related eBay purchases.

The label on the bubblewrap says: