Homebrew computing in 2015

General Discussion
#1

I am too young to have been a part of the homebrew computer club but I still feel nostalgic (is that the right word?) for the time when people could build their own computers in the garage. It would be fun to build a general purpose personal computer for the twentieth century! It is probably cheaper and easier to just buy a raspberry pi but a computer that I build myself seems more magical to me.

My thoughts are that an ARM cortex m3 would be a good base to build this project on… something like the STM32F103. It comes as a 48 lead LQFP so it can be hand soldered. It seems that there is linux support for that chip too as part of the uclinux project. Wikipedia says that uclinux is now a part of the main line kernel though so I don’t know if there are separate patches or what.

Does anybody here know much about building linux for these micros? Is this a reasonable ic for a homebrew computer?

1 Like
#2

I like the idea. What makes you want to use uClinux over FreeRTOS? You can still do interesting things like running a web server. It also let’s you use a much less powerful IC so you don’t need any extra RAM. Take a look at the LPC1768 used on the mbed. Doesn’t need a lot of extra circuitry to work and you get ethernet and USB OTG so you can plug in a keyboard and connect it to the net.

What kind of hardware did you want to attach to your computer? Keyboard, mouse, screen and an sd card reader or something?

1 Like