Mars Rovers: Sojourner

Sojourner was the first exploration rover sent to Mars. It was part of the Mars Pathfinder mission which consisted in sending to Mars a lander and rover. Sojouner traveled inside the lander, later named Carl Sagan Memorial Station, for almost seven moths arriving to the red planet's Aris Vallis region on July 4th, 1997.  The main goal of the Pathfinder mission was to demonstrate that it was possible to send a lander and a rover to another planet at a lower cost than previous missions. One day after the landing, on July 5th, the small rover was deployed, and made its first run on Mars soil.

OSHW Development Boards: Pinguino, Arduino, and Propeller Platform

Pinguino, Arduino and Propeller Platform are fully open source development boards that are available in the market. This is a brief summary about each one explaining their main characteristics trying to offer a simple guide for those who are looking for different options.

BeagleBoard, Get the Power of a PC in the Palm of Your Hand

Beagleboard is a small board, developed by some employees of Texas Instruments, that includes all the capabilities of a laptop in just 3x3 inches. The project aims to produce an inexpensive board that could be used to teach open source hardware and software. Although, Beagleboard doesn't include LCD, keyboard or Wi-Fi module, it has all the hardware necessary to host and control different kind of peripherals. The main reasons to design such a compact board are to reduce the costs, and allow developers to use their own peripherals and do what they want, for example, the USB port can be used to host a hub, so a keyboard, mouse, Bluetooth, cameras, or even a WI-FI connection can be added. The processor inside Beagleboard belongs to the OMAP3 family with ARM Cortex-8 CPU.