Beagleboard based kitchen PC project

I am coming up with a new geek project! In last autumn I came across the Beagleboard which looked very interesting to me – My next geek toy!

Not that I needed it … My first thought: What can I do with it? What is the best reason to buy such a cute thing?! I had several approaches like building a NAS, router but none of them seemed the be a good reason to buy such a board. I do have good solutions for that.

One evening my wife provided the idea for my new project: A kitchen PC! She is listening to the radio in the morning, needs several timers while cooking or baking, uses cooking recipes from the Internet and likes to take a look at the weather forecast. Since the radio in the kitchen has a bad signal and the egg timer can only used for one timer it was clear to me: I’ll build a kitchen PC for her – YAY!!

So what am I gonna do?

1. Buy a Beagleboard, power supplies, touchscreen for the user interface, wifi USB dongle, speakers (Small power consumption)
2. Build a case for the kitchen PC – nothing very special ; But I like it to be small and wall mounted
3. Build a minimalistic Linux based operating system for the Beagleboard (Quick bootup)
4. Design and create the program for controlling the PC

I was a bit lazy the last months. So I did not write these lines while developing the system. The system is finished for the moment and daily used – Cool! But I did not write anything about it yet.

Now I decided to write about the interesting parts of the story. I’ll split the topics in different posts, so I won’t end up with a huge post which no one likes to read. This first post is meant to introduce the project and give a brief view on the tasks and goals of the project. In the next post I’ll write down the single hardware parts I used for the project. So standby for the next post…