Normally when you power a "board", the board itself will have some bypass caps to handle some surges from the individual chips on the board.  There's usually a moderately large cap for the whole board, at least one small cap (~100nF) for each chip, and maybe a mid-sized cap for each "handful" of chips.

As a "protoboard supply", I suspect that the sparkfun schematic is providing some of these bypass caps "for the board", beyond what is (or might be) needed by the regulator circuit itself...

Altoids box.  Only tall enough for arduino+shield (3cm?)

I wrote the equivalent of "eval" for compiled fortran, a long time ago.
You can fit an interpreter in an arduino, have it eval code out of eeprom or flash or strings, and still have room for sketches as well, I think...

But it's not in there by default, and it wouldn't be an "easy" project!

It's pretty difficult to design a PCB that will accept a 28pin DIP cpu and not have room for a standard 28pin socket.  The people who design sockets understand tight spacing pretty well...

I have an (untested) eagle layout for the RBBB, since there's the big announcement:

Unlike other Modern Device Products, the schematic and design for the RBBB are released into the public domain.

But I wouldn't feel particularly comfortable doing the same thing to the BBB.

I should put a bunch of text on it before I release it anywhere, though.

locally, you can probably buy servo motors at hobby stores that sell radio-controlled planes and cars and things.  Be prepared for a bit of sticker shock; even radioshack doesn't charge $15 for a little DC motor!  (however, these are motors with a built-in gear chain and electronics, and once you add gears, even the surplus electronics dealers dump the price up quite a lot. $15 would be a pretty good price for a standard-sized servo from a "brick and mortar" hobby store.  You can do better online, especially buying direct from china, but...)  There not normally carried by electronics component dealers, as they're pretty much a "consumer item."  It's only recently that some of the dealers (especially in robotics) have been thinking "hey, why can't we sell high-profit-margin consumer items as well as incomprehensible components?"

For the adafruit kits, from the order page click the link to the project's individual web page, and the then "downloads" to find eagle schematics/etc.  Parts lists are usually on the first couple pages of the "Make it" link from the project page.

For BoArduino:
  http://www.ladyada.net/make/boarduino/download.html
  http://www.ladyada.net/make/boarduino/dc-parts.html
  http://www.ladyada.net/make/boarduino/usb-parts.html

...massive repository...

I'm not too fond of replacing "writing code" with "searching for  code that might already be written and modifying it."  Depending on complexity, amount of testing, and so on.

I think more of the library code should depend on others (inheritance, etc.)

 Ah.  Dependency hell.  Just like trying to run compile open source linux apps in a new environment.

(just playing devil's advocate, you know.)

An Arudino is a fine "quick prototyping" environment, but I really don't think that the libraries are extensive enough to provide THAT much of a head start to a commercial application (compared to, say, the complete libraries provided with avr-gcc, or the probably-more-extensive libraries provided with a commercial C compiler.)   The "environment" isn't much up to "professional" level either (note: I understand and even appreciate that it's not supposed to be.)  (no debugging, no source control, poor error reporting, lack of assorted types of analysis, etc, etc.)


What might be nice is being able to hire from a large crop of people with "prior experience" programming arduinos (compared to any other particular microcontroller/compiler combination.)  I've seen companies give up on one or more rather obscure architectures just because it was nearly impossible to get people to code for them.

To really catch on, the arduino libraries would have be more standardized to run on more varied hardware, which might be a bit tough given the relative scarcity (I think) of C++ compilers (vs standard C.)

Serial.read() returns an "int", and therefore prints the decimal representation of the ascii code for whatever character you typed.
To get echoing, you should do:

Code:

Serial.print(Serial.read(), BYTE);

Be careful; terminology is ambiguous.
An LED can contain one, two, or three light-emitting chips.
If it has one chip, it has one color.
Two chips of different colors can have three colors (one chip on, other chip on, or both chips on), and these are SOMETIMES called "tri-color."  The chips can be connected with a common cathode or anode (three-lead packages), or in "inverse parallel" (current in one direction for one color chip, the other direction for the other, or AC for both.)
A three chip LED usually has red, green, and blue chips, and can theoretically generate any color.  Full "RGB" leds will have four leads so that you can control each chip independently.  However, there are also three-chip LEDs with internal circuitry to sequence through multiple colors automatically.  These will only have two leads, and you have no control over how they behave.

There's a long discusion on J1/J2 in the instructions.  Does it clear up your question?

No one said the microcontroller concept is new, but to be the "new 555", the microcontroller has to reach a certain point WRT price, size, ease-of-use, and re-usability.    Sub $0.50 and 6 pins are both things that have happened within the last 5 years or so...

There's even a 6-pin SOT-23 PIC chip with 4 IOs.
For a while the Atmel ATtiny11 was "king of cheap", selling for $0.25 each in moderate quantity (something like 0.32 in 100 lots from digikey.)  Alas, they've discontinued the part :-(

However, your "new 555" comment serves to point out some of the weaknesses of modern microcontrollers as well.  The original 555 runs off supplies from 4.5 to 16V, and supplies (or sinks) up to 200mA of current on its output pin.  The inputs are as tough as nails.  You won't find that sort of ... sturdiness in a microcontroller.   There was an interesting discussion on Instructables about designing a digital replacement for antique door chime controllers (which are electromechanical; spring loaded solenoids with oil-filled dampers and such.)  By the time you interface to the ~24VAC on inputs and outputs and supply (your standard "doorbell transformer", you've added a LOT of expense, and your circuit board size is creeping up to where it's BIGGER than the original mechanical monster.  It was ... annoying.

No, you're not crazy.  Logic mostly survives in those cases where a CPU isn't fast enough, and even then it tends to be implemented in FPGAs and similar instead of with individual gates like 74xx logic.