“The heart of the kit it is the ‘BUGbase’, which has built in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and battery, along with the Cortex A-8 ARM for some raw computing guts. The base is similar to the Beagle Board in power and design, but has a bit more built in, like a runtime plug-in system for modules.

Speaking of modules. To extend the base, each kit has a general IO module (the Von Hippel), GPS, and so on. For video output, each kit comes with a full-color touchscreen LCD and HD video-output modules for either on-device or on-screen display. And sample code to use all of them, naturally. We will also have some sensors and components along, so people can use the Von hippel to plug into other projects or platforms through raw IO.

For development, I have a pre-built VirtualBox image, with everything installed. So it should be very fast to get off the ground by coping the VM to coders machines, and launching it.

Everything is open source, from hardware to virtual machine, so a prototype built on using a Bug can easily be remixed into any form factor or new product, using our designs as a starting point.”