Just a little something I cooked up ;) no pictures yet, but here's a wall of text about it...
I've got hand drawn schematics made up for an EOMA-68... er... I'm calling it a Carrier Board for now (the PCB that the CPU card goes into). This one uses only through-hole components, and all but two (the PCMCIA slot and, oddly enough, the Ethernet jack) are very cheap. The idea is that someone like me who is rather a bit of a dunce with the soldering iron can still put it together in a dedicated weekend, if so inclined. *That is, a person with fairly beginner-level hobby skills can buy a fistful of parts and a CPU Card, etch a PCB (or get one from somewhere) and after a few hours of lead fume inhalation, has a complete computer in their hands.* That's a huge gift, I think, to the Maker community, not to mention the technically-inclined poor folk out there (I *know* I'm not the only one!)... seriously, it sounds like good stuff to me.
My two rules for designing were (1) no surface mount anything at all period end-of-story, and (2) use as many very standard parts as possible. Every component can be had at Mouser Electronics in single unit quantities.
The Ethernet jack has the magnetics built in, so it's (unfortunately) the most expensive part on the board -- but I couldn't find a through-hole Ethernet transformer... I've probably also omitted some necessary things out of simple ignorance (I have a hunch that there's more to the USB connection than four wires, a power supply and data feed, and the connector itself, for instance). I'm more budding hobbyist with this stuff than anything else -- but hey, you gotta start somewhere, right? ;)
The only thing I don't like is that it still requires a custom PCB unless one wants to do some very creative dongle-making... probably doable but it'll be very ugly in a number of ways. That said, I'll be quite surprised if this design cannot get away with using a single-sided PCB -- meaning any shmuck who can get to eBay can order the supplies to make the board at home if they want to. (Sounds a little like me!)
If anyone wants to try reading my horrible chicken scratch I'll send out a link to a scanned copy, otherwise I'll try and work up the motivation to move it into my graphics software (CorelDRAW X3), since, although I have a copy of Kicad, I never really bothered to learn how to use it properly...
Any interest at all?