Minnowboard Max (or dev kit recommendation)

[Chojun]

Hey Everybody,

For some time now I've felt the hardware calling on me to abandon my web-development ways and return to the harsher reality of development (during nights and weekends). I'm interested in developing an OS for fun/learning/home automation projects. I hold a BS degree in Computer Science, with a fair amount of (somewhat stale: MIPS & Pentium Pro) _academic_ hardware experience so I feel that I'm up to the task by virtue of the fiery crucible of that degree. The wiki doesn't really offer much recommendation by way of specific hardware development kits so I thought I'd bring this here to see if the following board would be a good fit or a mistake.

I found this board and am curious to know what the community thinks of it: http://www.elinux.org/Minnowboard:MinnowMax. Does anyone foresee me running into any issues emulating this in QEMU (or others)?

I've also considered the Intel Edison but can't seem to find a suitable development kit for it that has all the peripherals that a typical PC would.

In summary, I'm looking for:

* Intel Arch
* Prefer IA32 (but x86-64 is okay but my OS will not go into Long Mode)
* PC Peripherals (e.g. USB, Video, persistent storage-capable, network)
* 'Easily' emulated

If anyone can recommend a good intel dev kit for a 'beginner' I'd sure appreciate it!

I look forward to getting to know you guys here better.


-Chojun

[no92]

Your PC. These boards often tend to don't have some features you listed. PCs emulated by VirtualBox, Bochs and QEMU fairly good.

If you are looking for a tiny board, I'd go for a Raspberry Pi. They are pretty cheap and offer video, audio, network and USB. The only downside is that it's ARMv6, which is both a little bit old and (obviously) not an Intel arch.

[Combuster]

The main assumption is that people use their host computer as their target computer. That said, a dedicated second computer shouldn't be too hard to come by.