A co-worker pasted this link into IRC this morning which put a big smile on my face:
Building the worst Linux PC ever
http://hackaday.com/2012/03/28/building-the-worst-linux-pc-ever/
the best course of action was emulating an ARM processor on an AVR. We’re not sure if we’re dealing with genius or madness here, but it did prove to be a valuable learning exercise in writing a modular ARM emulator.
Here's a speed-up video of it booting:
How fast is it? [Dmitry] tells us it takes two hours to boot up to a bash prompt, and four more to load up Ubuntu and login. If you want a Megahertz rating, good luck; the effective clock speed is about 6.5 kilohertz.
Aside from ARM emulation, I found the use of an old SIMM very intriguing. I've wanted more memory (not storage) in the past for an AVR project. I've used Microchip's SPI SRAM chips, but they are still pretty paltry. I didn't really consider that parallel DRAM would be possible to interface.
Anyone done any similarly masochistic projects that deserve a tip of the hat?
Cheers,
Drew
