[TriLUG] Other cheap tiny devices.

[Thomas Gardner]

All,

I didn't hear much about anything that people are actually using
Raspberries for or if anyone thinks they're worth anything, but I think
I'm going to change tack anyway.  I've recently convinced myself how
much better wifi would be for what I want to do, especially if I can
find extra cheap devices (which I suspect I can, with some help from
the community).

I've spent much of my day with Google today and I haven't turned
up a lot on my own.  Enough to encourage me that I might be on to
something, but not enough to run with.  So, I'm hoping to get some
recommendations for some kind of WAP or anything else I can get my
grubby little paws on that:

1) has wifi.

2) has USB.

3) can be reasonably easily hacked to run Debian from a disk plugged
into that USB port (thumb drive).  I don't think I want something like
OpenWRT, but I'm no expert on it.  It just doesn't seem like something
I'm interested in, as it seems like it would be pretty restrictive,
but I might be talked out of that.  By ``reasonably easily hacked''
I'm mainly looking for instructions.  I can follow instructions
pretty well.  I'd rather not have to invent everything on my own.
I'm going to be doing enough of that for the application, I don't
need to add to my troubles and have to do it for the platform also.
Although, the cheaper the platform is, the more inventing I'm willing
to do on it.  :-)

4) is as cheap as possible.  I'm hoping to get down near the $25ish
range.

Of course, it would also be very much acceptable to put the OS on an
SD card instead of on a thumb drive, but I'd still need a USB port to
plug in a USB sound card of some sort.  I doubt for the money there's
one with an SD card slot on it, but if there is, I'm all ears.  Mainly,
I just don't want to have to worry about how to shoehorn everything I
need into some teeny tiny flash space built into the machine.

For the first, most urgent project, I'm just going to be running a
microphone and speaker and some sort of soft phone SW (like Linphone ur
sumsuch) on each one, so they don't have to have a lot of horsepower.
I might try to plug in multiple speaker/microphone pairs on some of
them, but if the device is cheap enough, I wouldn't have to.

So, how 'bout it?  Anyone have a favorite cheap little hackable that
they would like to share with me?

Thanks,
tg.