I’m also an embedded systems guy.
It’s so nice that we have cheap and powerful ARM SoCs that can run Linux today.
I still code in assembler quite a lot... old habits die hard :-)
I like the cheap Raspberry Pi board, a nice ARM SoC with 500mb ram sitting on top is the heart of this 35 dollar beast. The BeagleBoard Black is even better.. but a few $ more.
Now, back to the BGA work station.
M4l