From the folks at Liquidware who brought us the beautiful Illuminato Arduino variant and numerous shields comes the (ahem) WTF?!-board Illuminato X Machina (announcement here), described by Wired writer Priya Ganapati as:
"...a motherboard prototype that uses separate modules, each of which has its own processor, memory and storage. Each square cell in this design serves as a mini-motherboard and network node; the cells can allocate power and decide to accept or reject incoming transmissions and programs independently. Together, they form a networked cluster with significantly greater power than the individual modules."The small board, cleverly sold alone or in 4-, 9- and 16-packs aims to be a different model for computing hardware, with power and data I/O on all four sides, and while it's hard to imagine applications, it's an impressive example of the power of open source hardware and clever design.
