I finally have my busted laptop back. I paved it and was in the process of reinstalling the important stuff when the storm hit. Since I’ll be moving back to that machine very soon, I figured I could break quarantine on the machine I’m currently using. Since the one thing you can’t run in Virtual PC is the embedded device emulator, I decided to install Windows CE. I stumbled across this article for DIY Wireless Access Points (from Wireless Hacks) which pointed me to a couple of embedded system vendors – Soekris and OpenBrick. I’d love to get CE up and running on one of those boxes and roll my own media client device, to learn about hacking embedded if for no other reason. I know Duncan has a cool homegrown audio PC project, but I was thinking something embedded would be even cooler.

There doesn’t seem to be much, if any, grass-roots community around building CE based devices. All the efforts on the embedded website seem to be geared towards large companies. For example, the US distributors of CE don’t list prices on their pages. I can only assume it’s a case of “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it”, at least for the individual developer. CE is not included in MSDN (though it used to be if memory serves). I can only find info on homebrew embedded hardware on Linux sites.

Where are there any other DIY or homebrew embedded sites that I don’t know about?

My team owns the architect track for TechEd 2004. We’re hoping to build on the very successful Architecture Symposium from PDC. As part of that effort, I own that community efforts for the architect track. I’m working on the plan now. Obviously, we’ll have “the usual” events: Ask the Experts, Birds of a Feather, Speaker Lounge, Attendee Party, etc. Any other suggestions? Please email me or leave a comment.