Sorry if this is a little bit off topic, but I'm pretty jazzed about some new projects I'm beginning.
It all started out with me thinking through how to get my 15y/o son away from World of Warcraft long enough to have some other kinds of fun and maybe learn something. He's got a great mind and does well in science and math in school, and says he might be interested in engineering (or medicine) as a career. So I started looking around for some projects we might do together that would be fun for both of us and that I could use as a vehicle for teaching him some technology.
Read on for the rest of the story...
Somewhere along the line, I discovered the N8VEM project.
The N8VEM Single Board Computer (SBC) is a home brew Z80 small computer project. It is made in the style of vintage computers of the mid to late 1970's and early 1980's using a mix of classic and modern technologies.
Its purpose is to entertain through education. It is intended to be used to teach and promote principles of electronic computer design. It is a solely non-profit educational project and is not intended for any commercial application. The N8VEM SBC and related peripherals would be ideal as a school project or could be used to teach basic computer hardware and software principles. 
The project is really quite large and has a very extensive following. The heart of the project are several bare circuit boards which can be populated by soldering in components to create a single board computer. But this is just the beginning. There are many different boards one can build as add-ons, to the point that it is quite reasonable to build a system that has the same characteristics as the original microcomputers like the MITS Altair S-100 machine. There are cassette and disk controllers, serial terminal and many more projects that are inexpensive and reasonable for intermediate level hardware hobbyists to build.
One of the nicest parts of this whole project is that it runs the CP/M operating system (aha! something on topic!). CP/M is free to use, and there are a ton of free development resources, applications and utilities available for it. In the end, if we can get through this, we will have built a completely functional S-100 based microcomputer that runs CP/M. A worthy project! I think it will look great on my son's college resume, and maybe I can stimulate some of his creative juices along the line.
There is more! But I'll leave that for the next blog entry...
