Open Source Hardware

John:
Indeed it might be very useful to look at.
I don't know about buying a board. It would eliminate my role in the same way as removing the distributed programming part eliminates yours.
However, almost the entire functionality of the board is contained on the proccessor chip, which is the same chip I posted in my last post. We could study and impliment a reduced version, or perhaps find a smaller lower feature processor.

As for Linux:
getting Linux to run on a system like this is a reasonably large task, but would be no harder on a home made board (even an FPGA based one) than on this, except this has a lot of the ground work already done. Its a case of device support and having a C compiler. I would be baffled if a linux device driver was not available for the FPGA Ethernet.

I don't dispute running Linux would be cool but it also introduces certain complications, and we may decide a simpler system would be more desirable.

Coffee to chat about it tomorrow?

I will examine varius alternative chips when I get time. These come in at about £15 each, but have a lot (and I mean a lot) of undesired functionality. Also although surface mount they have about 250 pins.