Freifunkblog

Talking about OpenEmbedded: The BeagleBoard will be available soon. A Motherboard with 600MHz ARM CPU + 256 MIB NAND-Flash + 128 MiB RAM + USB Host + and many more features. Details here: http://elinux.org/BeagleBoard. The price will be around 150.-US$. This matches perfectly with the new regulations of small selfimports from outside the EU. Starting from December 1, 2008 products not exceeding the value of 150,- Euros will be freed from paying tariffs and tax. Until then the limit was 22,- Euro.

Mit Verordnung (EG) Nr. 274/2008 (PDF-Datei) wurde unter anderem die Wertgrenze für die so genannten Kleinsendungen (Artikel 27 der Verordnung (EWG) Nr. 918/83 – ZollbefreiungsVO) auf 150 Euro angehoben. Bislang wurden bereits bei Sendungen, deren Wert über 22 Euro lag Einfuhrabgaben fällig – außer es handelte sich um Importe aus Staaten der Europäischen Gemeinschaft. Die angegebene Verordnung und die damit erhöhte Wertgrenze gilt ab dem 1. Dezember 2008. Damit ist eine bislang sehr enge Grenze für Eigenimporte etwa von HD-Discs aus dem Ausland gefallen. (nij/c't, 08.04.2008 08:38, http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Goldene-Zeiten-fuer-Eigenimporte--/meldung/106159/from/rss09)

Comment of Robert Schuster: "Ich finds gut: Embedded Systeme für alle und nicht für jene, die sich
teure Evalboards leisten können und ätzende NDAs unterscheiben wollen. :)"

By the way, Robert will have a presentation on OpenEmbedded at the upcoming Linuxtag in Berlin on from 3-4 pm on Thursday May 28, 2008 in Saal London (UG),

At the CeBIT I had the chance to talk to some fantastic folks of direct open embedded systems, a new Latvian company that is producing WLAN devices based on the GNU/Linux distributions like OpenWRT, OpenEmbedded and FlashSYS Linux.

Google Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1295574371890938537

In the video they present their devices and some show cases as well as FlashSYS, their own web based firmware for small router computers.

FlashSYS environment is a cross-operating system clent-server environment that allows developers to use existing web development skills (HTML, JavaScript, Ajax, Flash, SQLite, and Lua) to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications (RIA) for an embedded system with a very small footprint. (http://openrb.com)

Most of the free and open source companies presented their products in hall 5, which was packed with crowds of people. You can get an idea when you hear the background noise in the video. The interest in free and open source technologies is amazing and ever increasing.