Leaderboard

I have an idea for a home project that's been floating around in my brain for a while involving some relatively simple image pattern recognition. I've done assembly on the 68HC11 and AVR 8-bit micros in years past, but for this one I'm thinking of trying my hand at ARM development. Although it sounds like NI has some promising products on the way I'm guessing it will be too expensive for the hobby market. I've researched a few options and they are all lacking in some way... Raspberry Pi - Hard to beat $25 for all the features this comes with. Unfortunately it's not available yet and I suspect it will take some time for self-learning material to develop... and to be honest my ventures into linux environments haven't been particularly fruitful. Arduino Due - Arduino is a fairly mature platform with lots of available content to draw from. The Due is the first 32-bit ARM processor released for Arduino. Unfortunately, following a surge of post-maker faire publicity last fall the Due seems to have fallen off the planet. I couldn't even find references to it on Arduino's web site. mbed - Another interesting dev platform. Though it is a little more expensive at $60 it has the advantage of actually being able to purchase it. The downside? It uses a web-based dev environment. Thanks, I'll pass. Other tools I've found are positioned (and priced) as business tools, not hobbyist tools. Has anyone had particularly good experiences with an inexpensive ARM devkit and toolchain?