mmmmm.... me want! I'll buy it if he puts it out there.
"the mechanical keyboard mafia" is the most startlingly accurate phrase I have read today.
A Minimum Viable Computer, or Linux for $15
281–290 of 408 posts
Re: A Minimum Viable Computer, or Linux for $15
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we've already got a pretty powerful computer at around the 40$ price point (the raspberrypi), and I feel like it'd be impossible to beat it given the scale raspberry pi is at.
RasPi isn't a handheld though. And AFAIK there's no off the shelf case designs as nice as this.
I fully agree with everything that has been said in this reply chain. It is easy to get caught up in the "well, for just a few dollars more..." loop, and forget all of the accouterments that this includes, which are cheap but add so much to convenience.
Re: A Minimum Viable Computer, or Linux for $15
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I played MP3 files in realtime on my old Pentium 75 with 16MB of RAM with plenty of CPU and memory to spare. This thing is way more powerful than you need for simple music playback. Getting audio out however may be a challenge, maybe USB speakers?
MP3 already made such a PC sweat though. I doubt it could play 256 kbit AAC, and forget about HE-AAC or FLAC.
Re: A Minimum Viable Computer, or Linux for $15
#284The Bom for 1000 pieces is per piece 15$ (and 2.00$ for a 64gbyte sdcard looks optimistic, but difficult to tell typing on my phone). Placing, soldering and assembly is not factored in, wouldnt be surprised if this is another 15$, so production price is 30$, sales price then would be more like 60$. Edit: is the sd card connector missing in the bom? Cool project though.
The SD card is on the BOM (it’s on the bottom) but agree that the price for it looks optimistic.
Looking on AliExpress there are lots of unrealistically priced SD cards (1tb for $7!) so I wonder how many of these are just scams where they are formatted to appear bigger than they are, and also if that’s a realistic price that they are using.
Re: A Minimum Viable Computer, or Linux for $15
#285This is a neat idea and clever execution, but I just can't imagine ever using this over like a donated out-of-date laptop or something. I'd love to see something at like a 50-100 price point that could theoretically be more usable (more than 47 keys, more screen resolution, built in wifi)
I've sometimes thought about going to some small village somewhere and teaching interested locals how to code and use computers. I would need small, cheap devices that I can just replace whenever they get lost/stolen. Also standardized enough that I don't have to spend a ton of time doing hardware support. If someone brought a >$20 fully-contained device to market then I could buy 20 of them and plan a 6 month trip a…
It would be nice to have. One thought I can't shake is how wasteful the world is with perfectly good hardware that's "obsolete". For instance, I have an iPhone 5C that I practically can't give away which is way more powerful than the idea presented here. But because the hardware is undocumented and locked down and it's stupid difficult to replace the battery, there doesn't seem to be a reasonable way to turn it into a cheap computer, even though it really should be possible. (To be honest, I'd probably still use it as my phone if it still received security updates and I could replace the battery)
Re: A Minimum Viable Computer, or Linux for $15
#286> It costs $10,000 USD to build one of these > The ten thousandth one costs $15 As a software engineer, I'm used to being able to build essentially whatever I want, with the only cost being my time. I'm often unpleasantly reminded that software is an outlier in that regard and as soon as physical items are concerned, especially hardware, it turns out that manufacturing even a simple thing is prohibitively expensive i…
Most of that "$10,000" is because of paying someone else for custom parts. If you use existing parts or make the custom parts yourself (if you have the ability/tools), it's less than $100. So the software equivalent would be if you oursourced a large chunk of your project to someone else, and in that case, I think $10,000 might not be too far off.
Interesting take, I guess trees can be pretty cheap if you grow them yourself.
Re: A Minimum Viable Computer, or Linux for $15
#287> It costs $10,000 USD to build one of these > The ten thousandth one costs $15 As a software engineer, I'm used to being able to build essentially whatever I want, with the only cost being my time. I'm often unpleasantly reminded that software is an outlier in that regard and as soon as physical items are concerned, especially hardware, it turns out that manufacturing even a simple thing is prohibitively expensive i…
> it turns out that manufacturing even a simple thing is prohibitively expensive if it's done at a small scale
You can overcome some of the scaling costs with 3D printers. It's pretty cheap to make fairly robust plastic parts with a 3D printer if you can do basic CAD.
Re: A Minimum Viable Computer, or Linux for $15
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the point of something like this would be to be completely self contained. A shell in your pocket.
But but… you have a phone in there too… Which even on iOS has decent ssh clients.
A minimum viable computer w/ integrated keyboard & linux etc.. + use phone as the display.
That seems like a winning combination!
Re: A Minimum Viable Computer, or Linux for $15
#289Would be nice to see an equivalent “minimum viable trustable computer” that used only parts from “trusted” supply chains (pick your own definition of “trusted”, but it might for example exclude generic parts marketplaces).
https://betrusted.io/ is pretty much that. Initial HW platform is there, not sure how much of the SW is ready
Yes, that sort of thing! Its claim to trustworthiness seems to be based on the idea that its CPU runs on an FPGA so you can audit the source code for that and compile it yourself. But the underlying FPGA looks like a proprietary Xilinx device. Who’s auditing that?
Re: A Minimum Viable Computer, or Linux for $15
#290We had something like this in 2001. It was called the Agenda vr3 and it ran a full X session with the FLTK in 16meg of RAM. However, the history of PDA's that run linux is mostly lost since LinuxDevices.com doesn't really exist anymore. I owned several of these including Agenda VR3, Vtech Helio, Zaurus, etc. It was quite a nice system even without wireless unless you count IrDA. It used FTP over RS-232 for installing…
Someone had XFree86 Server ported to Zaurus' Qtopia environment as an app. I didn't understand what `export DISPLAY=:0` meant back then but I could just do that. That was objectively far more awesome compared to their later Windows Mobile offerings developed in cooperation with WILLCOM. e: ran a search on my disk for "\.ipk" and got a few files. Emacs, gtk2, konqueror, minicom, nano, prism3 driver, xmms, XQt, Blackbo…
Dump it to the Internet Archive. I liberated a couple more fossil (pre-2000) versions of the Borland C++ suite that way.