BigDumbDinosaur wrote:
Seriously, building around an ARM, 65C134 or other microcontroller is too much like building a PC, where, as another member put it, you are assembling (not building) macroscopic components. That's screwdriver work, which isn't at all the same as taking some chips, capacitors, RAM, etc., scratch-designing a circuit, and then soldering the mess together and seeing if it goes or blows.[/size]
I haven't done it myself, but I have to agree with this. The modern micro controllers are so self contained, they literally need little more than power to get something up and running. It's an exciting development for folks that just want to get stuff done that need a micro processor, but pretty far from the concept of "building a computer".
Now, we can get all grognardy, and "get off my lawn", and "if you're not grinding gears, you don't know what computer design is", and "if you're not weaving, you're not coding", so it's a matter of how far you want to take it. The beauty is that you can take it all the way from off the shelf boards (heck I think even Radio Shack is selling Arduino kits now), through build SBCs with CPU down to hand crafting CPUs out of TTL gates to burn on to a PGA, or simply wrap together. You can do whatever you want any where along that spectrum, at home, with data from the internet. It pretty much stops cold at making transistors at home from beach sand. Home foundries aren't quite common place.
That's why it boils down to what you're really interested in learning and accomplishing, from design, to interfacing, to code, etc.
That's one reason I went the simulator route. I started out thinking of building a board, but ended up creating a simulator. That helped scratch itch I had. I still think a simple SBC similar to POCv1 would be interesting.
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