Wow, thanks!

By the way, I also wrote some more at the Arduino forum here with a couple more pictures.

Wow... Wired and Slashdot. The last 6 hours have been kind of funny and exciting and educational. I have a lot of emails in my inbox, and I'm going to reply to every one of them because there are a lot of insanely cool ideas, and I'm going to try to summarize them all up and share them over the next few weeks... while I work on my projects using the Illuminato X Machina boards (pronounced ill-oo-min-ah-toe ex mah-kee-na).

The really humbling part about when someone else writes something about a project you're working on is realizing just how much you suck at writing... but you only realize that when you see how someone could summarize your entire series of blog posts with a ridiculously more concise version:

"An ambitious group of hardware hackers have taken the fundamental building blocks of computing and turned them inside out in an attempt to make PCs significantly more efficient. The group has created 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."

Well, hmmm yes... that's exactly it... thanks, Priya :-) And then someone apparently passed another version to Slashdot:

"A group of hardware hackers have created 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 design, called the Illuminato X Machina, is vastly different from the separate processor,memory and storage components that govern computers today."

Which is also a much better version than my explanation of the Illuminato X Machina. Ok, so I think I'm going to stay hacking hardware instead of writing professionally. Thanks Anonymous Slashdot reader :-)

While I'm on the topic of thanks, David Ackley (from UNM who I met at the Santa Fe), Chris, Omar, Mike, Justin and I also wanted to thank:

• Dave Mellis for the insane job laying the groundwork for the IDE
  
• John Norair for not being too harsh reviewing the project
• Nate at Sparkfun for inspiration and cheap parts
  
• Phil Torrone at Make for letting me talk on the panel at Maker Faire about OSHW theory, and lending me back copies of Make Magazine, which motivated me to get off my ass and build stuff
  
• The guys at GOSH who are working really hard to make OSHW accessible and solid
• Everyone who has mentioned the Transputer, Replicators (um...?), Luminet, and The Connection Machine...

I'm very excited... in a pop-some-more-penguin-mints kind of way (I have a lot of empty tins if you're interested). This is what Open Source Hardware was meant to be like I think, but in this case the last 6 hours have felt like a lot of "open source ideas", with tons of communities all over the place talking about what ideas they have. So now I know what I'm going to do. I have spent the last few hours collecting hundreds of questions, and ideas, and emails, twitterthings (a little part of me dies inside everytime I say tweet), and chat blurbs and I will do what Open Source was meant to do: incorporate them back into the projects and code I am working on with the Illuminato X Machina and the Santa Fe Project.

In the meantime, I set up a dedicated site where I'm going to keep all the information like docs and schematics and gerbers and IDE compiler code and samples over the next few months... a lot of people are asking about them but they're not done... lots of documentation to write, and files to convert and zip up, but it should all be up by the end of the weekend.