In the april 2008 issue of the Elektor magazine appeared a project called DigiButler, integrating a Coldfire MCF52231 microcontroller from Freescale Semiconductor. By that time it was attractive because of its relatively low cost and its Ethernet port.
But it had a few design flaws limiting its functionality and required significant work to become a really useful device. So, it never got the audience it deserved as a home automation server, but it triggered the concept and the early development of Zdanetix.

The Elektor Digibutler Project, Part 1, Part 2.

An experimental port to the Windows Environment of a software package designed for Freescale microcontrollers.

Hexadoku is the sudoku variant of the Elektor magazine...

The Piccolino is a prototyping platform that can be used for rapid prototyping and testing.
It is based on the PIC16f887 microcontroller from Microchip.
It is programmed in situ by a powerful but totally free programming tool, running on a PC as an IDE (Integrated Development Environnment) and featuring the JAL language (Just Another Language), which includes a complete I/O library and makes the low level features of the microcontroller transparent to the programmer.