I've played with several microcontrollers over the years but I've been especially excited about the opportunity to try the Gumstix line
My wife needs some cockpit voice recorders so I recently looked around for a good solution. The Gumstix seemed like a fine place to start. Its support of an MMC card ensured that I could store several hours of compressed audio and its low power requirements should allow me to easily run it off of a battery, even for overnight trips.
There are lots of things I've dreamed of doing with Gumstix so I got the 400ax-bt waysmall computer and an Audiostix. The CPU module has Bluetooth and a 400MHz CPU. I don't plan to need those for this project but I wanted to experiment with the full capabilities.
Out of the box the waysmall has two serial interfaces. I connected one to my computer and got a bootloader prompt when I applied power. It booted without issue and I was able to log on over the serial port.
I don't have an RS-232 port on the tablet computer I'm using these days so I decided to try the Bluetooth. It worked right off the bat! I was surprised. It works well at ~30'. It turns out that the Bluetooth is also handy because I have to swap out the serial ports for the Audiostix. (I could also use the USB interface but I'd have to locate my cable...)
So, once I verified that things worked I tried the Audiostix. This was the first failure. There doesn't seem to be support for it in the shipped (non-modular) kernel. This forced me to start compiling my own root filesystem.
As a first attempt I tried the latest Subversion-maintained version. The installation went well but it failed while booting once and yielded lots of Bluetooth errors. Although it seemed to be able to perform a Bluetooth scan, I was unable to connect with it. I wanted to get back to a known good situation so I downloaded the r162 rootfs from Sourceforge. That restored Bluetooth functionality.
Next I decided to try building my own r162. After a minor tweak (to fix the ntp URL), that version installed and worked just like the precompiled one. O.k., now I know I can build something that works.
Now I'm just bumbling around trying different revisions. I hope to hit on one that is robust but also includes audio support. This will take awhile.
--kyler