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The BeagleBone Black is my newest electronic toy. It’s a single board linux machine that can run off a USB socket for power (and serial console access), and boots reasonably quickly into a graphical interface. I’ve of course disabled X on the system, as I don’t want it wasting cycles running a widow server that will never be used.

It’s going to be the model as I expand my home network for a small programmable interface to hardware, software and the network. There are lots of tasty GPIO pins to be used for controlling lights, relays and other devices; it can easily drive a USB sound card and be a network audio receiver; it can be wired up to a temperature sensor or four and be made into a weather station that feeds Graphite metrics and data about the world around me. It can also be plugged into a GPS unit and turned into a very accurate network time source.

All of these and more are on my list. Once I find the time and energy to work on them. Oh yeah, and the USB sound card, and the active GPS antenna, and the soldering kit, and the random assortment of resistors and caps needed to regulate power.