New MS developer board.


Sharks Cove board with Intel Atom CPU targeted at Windows developers.



One really thinks this is aimed at the Raspberry Pi/Arduino market. But at $300 dollars, who is really going to choose it. Microsoft  has a tradition of not supporting speciality products for any period of time. Zune and etc etc etc. Even if it was worth it I would shy away from it. Ironically you can take a pico motherboard and dc-dc power supply and in effect have the same thing for a fraction of the cost.

Now if you really want to get inane on this, I will take my old 486 laptop and add all kinds of breakout cables to do quite a bit. Parallel, serial,  vga, and etc. The 486 laptop was free. Cables did have some cost to them, but no where near $300. If you know anything about electronics, a "1" is plus five volts and a "0" is near zero volts. That is true for the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, personal computers, and a zillion developer boards. Not all interfaces will be using digital, but you get the idea.



Run my robot on an old Pentium 1 with linux as the os. With a laptop or most any standard legacy machine you can add a variety of interfaces:

 Parallel
http://www.instructables.com/id/No-solder-parallel-port-break-out/

Serial
http://www.instructables.com/id/DB9-serial-break-out-cable/

Vga
http://www.instructables.com/id/Vga-breakout-cable/

Plus others such as usb. Also consider:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Electronic-Guides/


It's your choice!

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