Smallest/cheapest possible Python platform?

[Tomasz Rola]

On Sat, 26 May 2012, Roy Smith wrote:

> What's the smallest/cheapest/lowest-power hardware platform I can run 
> Python on today?  I'm looking for something to use as a hardware 
> controller in a battery-powered device and want to avoid writing in C 
> for this project.
> 
> Performance requirements are minimal.  I need to monitor a few switches, 
> control a couple of LEDs and relays, and keep time over about a 30 
> minute period to 1/10th second accuracy.  Nice-to-have (but not 
> essential) would be a speech synthesizer with a vocabulary of maybe 50 
> words.
> 
> The Rasberry Pi certainly looks attractive, but isn't quite available 
> today.  Can you run Python on an Arduino?  Things like 
> http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/board-detail.php?product=TS-7250 are 
> more than I need, and the $129 price probably busts my budget.

If you are on tight budget and depend so much on Python, I'm afraid you 
should either:

a. grow your budget

b. try another language

For what I know, I wouldn't touch Arduino unless I really had to. The 
reason for this, I have been spoiled by machines, of which the smallest I 
wanted to touch had 3mb of ram. Arduinos, with their ram in kilobytes at 
best, don't qualify as interesting from my point of view.

Also, I don't think they are so much attractive price-wise. I would rather 
buy myself a Beagle Bone, like this one:

http://www.adafruit.com/products/513

http://beagleboard.org/bone

However, if all that you want is flip some leds, this is huge overkill.

For led flipping, Arduino sounds ok, just not with Python-as-we-like-it. 
Maybe some pseudoPython can be had on it. Myself, I would rather go with 
one of  Arduino's supported languages or assembly. Or Forth. If you land 
among embedded systems, it's better to speak embeddish or you will feel 
uncomfortable.

Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **