The e-Health sensor Shield enables Arduino and Raspberry Pi designers to conduct biometric and medical applications where body monitoring is required implementing nine unique sensors such as Pulse, Oxygen from the blood (SPO2), airflow (breathing), body temperature, electrocardiogram (ECG),glucometer, Galvanic skin response (GSR sweating), blood Pressure (sphygmomanometer) and patient movemnt (accelerometer).
The Bulgarian manufacturer Olimex has just released an open source low cost single board computer based on i.MX233 integrated circuit from Freescale.This board features a powerful ARM926J core running at 454 MHz, 64 MB RAM, one high speed USB host port, and even a PAL / NTSC video output. This board is able to run Linux from the SD card bringing you a powerful system at the cost of an 8-bit microcontroller development board.
MSP430 Launchpad from Texas Instruments is one of the cheapest microcontroller development boards (4.30 $), but it was lacking a free IDE (I mean free as in freedom, not as in free beer). Now there is Energia, an Arduino-like IDE for MSP430 Launchpad, which makes it easy to get started, no matter the technical level of the user.
What would you say about 25$ single board computer ? Now it has become a reality with Raspberry Pi, a low ARM GNU/Linux box.
It has a quite impressive set of features considering its price. It’s based on BCM2835 SoC which contains a 700 MHz ARM processor and a Videocore 4 GPU capable of HD video
A few years ago it was expensive and almost impossible to manufacture custom mechanical parts at home. Recently we have seen the rise of the low cost 3D printers (usually under 1000 $), allowing you to have your own factory at home.