I wrote an extremely complicated program that runs on an arduino board with a li-ion backpack so I don't have to connect it to my computer or a wall and I use it to control almost my entire house using the zigbee network. Obviously I don't want to have to plug it into my computer and since I only have a laptop I don't always have it plugged in or turned on so it is not really feasible to route all commands through the computer anyway. Portability is extremely important. It remains hand held but must accept so many inputs that I had memory issues. The 1kbyte seemed good enough for a while but with this new system I used all of the space in the ram and it crashed the system. While this seems like it wouldn't be that bad it was almost catastrophic for me. I have a mustang gt cobra that stays on a lift above my 69 charger. Luckily the charger was in the driveway at the time but when the memory overflow occured it changed the wrong address when I tried to remotely deactivate my alarm system using the device and lowered the auto lift. If the car was underneath it at the time we would have been talking 1200 of dollars of money into this car not including cost to buy it gone and another 1200 or more to fix it. I'm not usually emotional but I would have cried no joke. If not adding support for mcu's or cpu's with better memory then at least add support for external ram upgrades
Have you been following the discussions in the Hardware -> Development forums?
Here's discussion in regard to porting to a AtMega32 http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1161487016
Also you implemented your project with that much risk without doing some serious testing first? Sounds like you got lucky!
Thank you for the link. I guess I didn't research thoroughly enough. In response to the second part I did test it a great deal. I actually used it with no hitch for about a week before the incident. The problem I had was that I was using it to store all data so that I could have one button do 2 tasks such as alarm on if it was off and alarm off if it was on. I didn't read the entire thread because it was so long but from what I gathered it is complicated, buggy, and imperfect. The only thing I really need is a ram upgrade. If I use the idea from the quadtower on liquidware and make a dual core arduino will it start to use memory space on the other chip if the first runs out or do I have to load separate programs onto each and have them communicate? (Actually they wouldn't really even have to communicate) Or could I simply put out another $3 for another chip and add it to a protoboard even?
There's discussion on using the 'soon to be released' ATmega328, which is pretty much a drop in replacement, but with 2x the flash, ram, and eeprom of the ATmega168.
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1193254782/0