Polyphemus Demonstration and Evaluation Kit

Dave,

Your article might garner some interest if your readers had any idea of what you were talking about. I'm sure there are those out in InternetLand who understand completely and therefore don't need your article, but I would bet the majority of Popular Science readers come to the Popular Science website to LEARN something they don't know. Being confronted with "Every AVR programmer worth her weight in ATmegas knows about the AVR Butterfly--a ridiculously low cost ATmega169 demonstration and evaluation kit" tells me absolutely nothing. A nice sentence full of sound and fury signifying nothing and definately a sentence that does not inspire me to read further. So when I see any AVR's or ATmegas walking down the street, I'll be sure to cross over to the other sidewalk.

I agree. What the hell is it and why would I want to build one?

Dave,
Nicely done. As a hobbiest with a butterfly and arduino this looks like a fun and useful project. Its just the cost of that color LCD that kills, but such is life.

I wonder what version 2 will look like.

Great work. I WILL Build one.

There must be some variant on this that would fire imaginations the way the PopTronics Cosmac Elf did in the 70's.

looking at the build info though, the LCD board is sort of dauntingly expensive. There must be a more affordable alternative.

By the looks of it it might be hard to build if you don't know what te heck he is talking about

For people who were/are concerned about the cost of the Nokia 61xx display...there is a cheap alternative, that also gets you a nice 3.7v rechargeable battery for nothing. T-Mobile has been selling these phones in Wal Mart, (prepaid cellular thingy), for under 30 dollars...(it might have been about 20 when I picked one up). I'd sacrifice mine, but it works in areas, like my house, with marginal signals where all other phones I tried fail.