Christian Jaeger wrote:
Raoul Duke wrote:
  
hi,

I'm curious to know how folks have fared in attempting to get things
onto sundry embedded systems. E.g there are inexpensive-but-limited
things like the Parallax Propeller which would be possibly neat to
program via something like Termite.
  
    

You should probably describe more precisely what you want to do.

 From what I read, the Parallax Propeller currently has 2KiB (512 32-bit 
words) of per-core memory, and 32KiB of global RAM which, if I 
understand correctly, is not directly executable by the cpu. (The next 
version of the Propeller is said to get 256KiB of global RAM.) This 
directly leads to two conclusions:

  
Think of termite and ant colonies, and bee hives.  Intelligence seems to arise from dumb little insects sharing smells with each other. So too  you can create intelligence with a vast army of "termites" with Scheme running on a mini-itx or other single-board computer playing the "mother-ship" role.  Of course, each object is simple so you can effectively model the system before building any hardware.

The Parallax is getting too fat, IMO. On the other hand, tiny micros for DIY projects are cheap from Amtel and Maxim. And so is the GPL C compiler.

Then there is http://www.tinyos.net/ for embedded wireless networks.

Cheers,
-Bob-