It's a great demonstration of what can be done with an 8-bit RISC microcontroller. The biggest downside is that AVRs can only execute code from flash ROM. You

It's a great demonstration of what can be done with an 8-bit RISC microcontroller. The biggest downside is that AVRs can only execute code from flash ROM. You can't just throw apps on an SD card and run them; the list of apps (which seem to be instances of C++ classes) is hardcoded, and adding a new app requires reprogramming the whole chip. An intelligent bootloader that could burn executable files from the SD card into ROM would be awesome. Yes, you're only limited to about 10,000 writes, but coupled with Contiki-style multitasking, this could be quite cool. The other idea (which not many people have tried) is to make some kind of "virtual machine" that interprets bytecode from RAM. There is a Forth implementation (amforth) but not much aside from that. Things get really tight when all you have is 2K for data and bytecode. I'm sure a couple demoscene coders just scrambled off to get working on that after reading this. :p Rossum has also done some extremely impressive stuff with ARM chips as well, including the RBox, a game console that's literally the size of a coin: http://rossum.posterous.com/building-the-rbox http://rossum.posterous.com/building-the-rbox