Nice Dream

I really liked my idea. It was a serious possibility, and it was, for the most part, doable.

But then I drew up a Bill of Materials, and I discovered a serious problem: it's too damn expensive.

Nobody said that building embedded systems would be expensive. I certainly didn't think so, especially because of Parallax's low (-ish) price for their extremely high-end Propeller microcontroller. But then I reallized that my computer wouldn't have a TTL serial interface on it, so I added the USB Prop Plug to interface to the Propeller. Then, I realized that it dosn't have built-in storage, so I need to get a tiny annoying little 24LC256 EEPROM chip, which is probibly more extravagant than it needs to be (who needs I2C for 32KBs? The chip accepts TTL serial for programming, why can't it use it for EEPROM access?)

A breadboard, a wiring kit, and several miscellanious parts later (Thanks, Mouser!), I'm at $126.39, and that's just an estimate.

I think I'm gonna get Google ads now....