I am pleased to announce that a box of 16 Rascals arrived from China on Tuesday, the first Rascal sale has been made, and the first Rascal has been shipped to a Distinguished Gentleman in the District of Columbia. I've been working on the Rascal for exactly a year as…

The latest circuit boards arrived amidst the snowbanks of Somerville, MA, USA, from the Baoan district of Shenzhen, Guangdong, China, via UPS last week. Two Rascals are being assembled over the next week. If they work, I'll build a batch of 10. On the last revision, the only known problems…

I recently faced a problem with the Rascal where I needed to test whether some of the pins on the processor were damaged by bad soldering. A couple of the pins used for talking to the Ethernet transceiver were acting weird, and I thought there might be a short circuit…

Rascal development is continuing at a furious pace. Rascal 0.4, which has a cheaper, more awesome memory arrangement than previous versions, arrived from the assembler recently. I've been working on rebuilding the bootloaders properly so they work with the new memory. To do this I've had to understand some…

I just received the next revision of the Rascal (0.4); the boards should be assembled by next week. Like the previous versions, the new Rascal can mate with most Arduino shields. I haven't tested them all, and they're not all supported in software yet, but mechanically, they fit together.…

One unusual function of the Rascal blog is to document publicly the plans I have for the Rascal as a defense against patents. Why don't I patent these ideas myself? The average time for a patent to issue is 6 years; the cost is somewhere around $10,000. These ideas…

I've decided that it's time to get rid of the NAND flash chip on the Rascal. The new idea is that the Rascal will have a microSD card slot on it. The bootloaders and the Linux kernel will continue to reside on the serial flash, but the filesystem, which previously…

The circuit boards for the next revision of the Rascal arrived from Illinois while I was in New York for the Open Hardware Summit. The new board has a few changes that I hope will be improvements. On the bottom of the board, the programming connector is replaced with just…

I just sent the first working version of the Rascal to a friend of mine in California who has been helping with Rascal software development and debugging on the side. The hardware, which uses the second PCB revision, is not flawless, but it works well enough to download and boot…

The second revision of the Rascal arrived in mid-August. After a little mucking about with a JTAG pod, it can execute code. A lot of my friends have been asking me whether the Rascal is ready for action now. The hardware is in good shape-- it's not flawless, but it's…