I was quite astonished to read about this BUG platform: “an open source, web-enabled, modular software + hardware platform”. This kinda says it all. 🙂 It’s still in beta, but they are targeting Q4 2007 right now to release their BUG-base, the core product, featuring an ARM microprocessor and all kind of interfaces you might desire (notice the MPEG4 HW encoding/decoding support!). Like this featurefest is not enough yet, you can extend the base station with all kind of modules: “GPS, Digital Camera / Videocam, Touch-sensitive Color LCD Screen, Accelerometer, Motion Sensor”, you name it! Before you stop drooling over the hardware specs, save some drool to drool on the software specs. 🙂 They have it nicely running on an OSGi framework! Extension galore. Judging by the screenshots, I have the impression they are running it on the eclipse framework which is an extension of OSGi (Paul, correct me if I’m wrong ;)).
This really seems the ultimate “toy for boys” or “Lego Mindstorms for adults” 🙂 at least in a geeky world 😉
Reminds me of this site/magazine where creating DIY gadgets is just daily routine.. 🙂