Handyboard

From EWiki

The MIT Handy Board is a great little controller for robotics. I encountered it through Botball back when they were using Handy Boards. The hackability of Handy Boards is second to none, with full schematics available and simple components.

Interactive C

The official language & runtime of the Handy Board is Interactive C, a strange bytecode-interpreted version of C. It has a good number of missing features (like the switch statement, which was finally added in version 7) and no debugging facilities whatsoever. The biggest downside, however, is its painful slowness. I once clocked it at about 4000 lines per second, but I have reason to suspect that number is high. Regardless, we're measuring kilohertz performance on a megahertz processor. It's okay for some things, but seriously reduces possibilities.

Hardware quirks

The Handy Board, while one of the most fun controllers I've worked with, is one of the buggiest controllers I've seen. They suffer from all kinds of little quirks when pushed. Unless you know your way around and have a soldering iron in hand, they can become very problematic. The biggest problem with some Handy Boards is servo jitter that they suffer. It makes servos virtually impossible to use in some situations. Fortunately there is a fix if you know where to find it.