231–240 of 408 posts
Picture this: - monocoque anodized aluminum housing with coin screw o-ring battery port that houses an 18650; -silicon gasketed polycarbonate faceplate held with stainless hex button head screws, waterproof to 100 meters - tactile clicky button keys beneath a silicone membrane for waterproof-ness. - detachable rubberized wifi antenna. A feller can dream...
This is nice. This is a simple, straightforward design, and a reasonably convenient form factor. Two biggest limitations are RAM and wireless interfaces, or rather lack thereof. This thing has less RAM than my router (admittedly a $70 box), and has neither WiFi nor BT. It does not seem to have many GPIO pins, too. With the amount of RAM installed, it's mostly a handheld terminal, and maybe a handheld console with emu…
Well said. It's a great project and impressive execution at $15! > While this is admirable as a proof of concept, I suspect that moving the price point up to, say, $30 could give a much more useful and hacker-friendly device. I agree. I think this project proves that ultra low cost is viable. Now relaxing the constraints a bit to add RAM and WiFi could iterate it right into an optimal spot. I wouldn't want to go much…
Reminds me of the Pocket Chip ( https://opensource.com/article/17/2/pocketchip-or-pi ) which is a pretty fantastic little device that shouldn't exist.
This is nice. This is a simple, straightforward design, and a reasonably convenient form factor. Two biggest limitations are RAM and wireless interfaces, or rather lack thereof. This thing has less RAM than my router (admittedly a $70 box), and has neither WiFi nor BT. It does not seem to have many GPIO pins, too. With the amount of RAM installed, it's mostly a handheld terminal, and maybe a handheld console with emu…
Surely an ESP32 should be able to run Linux. Then you would get Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. After all Linux used to run on 486, BSD ran on 386.
Granted, that's going through SimH; it would be interesting to see if retrobsd or litebsd could be ported to run on ESP32 natively.
Give me a 80x24 font terminal and framebuffer support for SD2/video/images/PDF, and I'm sold. This has no internet support, but who cares as I can just rsync the NNTP dir from/to slrn in my laptop and read good stuff offline, and just answer over the laptop, too. Or, well, an Atheros dongle would work fine. For coding, JimTCL with or without SDL2 is fun, and, for gaming, text adventures and roguelikes would rock here…
The screen is just too low rez for an 80x24 terminal. You would need a 3x9 font, which I know from experience are close to unreadable. 320x240 displays more often ran at 40x24 which is too small for the modern world. At the end of the article he talked about upgrading to a 640x480 display which would make the 80x24 terminal a real possibility. The surprisingly expensive 800x480 display would be even better, you would…
But the Z2 Nethack build was patched to support a ~64x16 res (68x20 I think), so that worked well among some forth interpreter and well, gopher clients and IRC.
The custom Slashem I built didn't have that patch, (and the patch was doable for sure), but I was lazy and just ran setfont.
Z machine games were perfectly playable on 64x16.
This is nice. This is a simple, straightforward design, and a reasonably convenient form factor. Two biggest limitations are RAM and wireless interfaces, or rather lack thereof. This thing has less RAM than my router (admittedly a $70 box), and has neither WiFi nor BT. It does not seem to have many GPIO pins, too. With the amount of RAM installed, it's mostly a handheld terminal, and maybe a handheld console with emu…
> neither WiFi nor BT I understand having WiFi, it'd be great for a small device like this. But why would we need Bluetooth? It only has 32MB of RAM so I doubt you could get any music running on it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Enough for Tmux, busybox, SSH/Mosh, Lynx, Gopher, NNTP, IRC over bitlbee, music and video playing over Bluetooth speakers, PDF readers (fbipdf, fbpdf2), epub readers (unzip+lynx script), on the go coding...
Would you really want to code on this tiny screen though? I guess some people would, but you'd probably be a lot more comfortable even on a 12" or 10" laptop/netbook.
Something that I have always wanted was an SMS ONLY device. A device, kind of like the SideKick (remember Danger invented Android, got bought by Google - then the founder was paid ~$90,000,000 severance from Google for coercing a female colleague to be his 'sex slave' -- Yeah, that Danger, Andy Rubin.) but I just want a device that only sends and receives SMS and thats it. Can this machine accept a SIM in a future it…
I'd love a modern RIM 850 that could do all my messaging (Discord, Telegram, SMS) and nothing else. Keep the 850 formfactor, keyboard, that amazing thumbwheel, but give it something like e-ink and great connectivity. Hell, throw a WiFi hotspot in it if we absolutely must.
Reminds me of the Pocket Chip ( https://opensource.com/article/17/2/pocketchip-or-pi ) which is a pretty fantastic little device that shouldn't exist.