It is certainly not a lost cause if you are a reasonably competent developer that's familiar with linux. There's definitely a learning curve though. I haven't gotten into it myself, although I've been meaning to for a while.

You'll need the proper environment to compile binaries that will run on this particular ARM platform. The info can be found around here somewhere by searching. From there, it's a matter of porting one of the available programs and working out how to accept input and display info on the screen.