Take my money. No, really, this is precisely the sort of thing I've wanted for ages, and I don't have the time or resources to build it myself.
This is basically the HP 200LX on steroids.
Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life
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Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life
#12Man, I want this, but IBM AT level, 32-bits with at least a 386 and 8MB of RAM.
There were a bunch of those appearing on the various Chinese sites recently.
https://www.tindie.com/products/cycle/pocket386-retro-dos-co...
Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life
#13Man, I want this, but IBM AT level, 32-bits with at least a 386 and 8MB of RAM.
The IBM AT used an Intel 80286
Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life
#14Not an XT clone per se. XT had 8088 CPU, CGA/Hercules display adapter, and a 640KB RAM with a PC speaker. This one has 80186 and 1MB RAM with MCGA (VGA) and Adlib emulation too. It's better than an XT.
This one has ESP32 just running 80186 emulator.
Still, it's not emulating an XT. XT is a very specific PC configuration. Maybe they just wanted to emphasize that it was ancient.
Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life
#15I think there is a class of device here that is missing. Low power but forever devices that have some basic functionality. Over time I could see this taking over laptops and the like as ultra-low-power became more and more capable.
Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life
#16>100+ hours of battery life
you will spend 99 of those hours waiting for screen refresh (1/second).
Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life
#17It would be really neat if the emulator had some kind of "escape mode" where it could jump to and run the native instruction set.
It could even be implemented to look like some kind of extension card in RAM. You write native instructions to a piece of RAM and call a special (otherwise invalid) 8086 instruction and the native execution kicks in.
Or if you want to make it more ambitious, create a COM or EXE format which indicates that the instructions are really ESP32 native, but with full access to the BIOS functions with some kind of translation layer.
Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life
#18Pretty dang cool. Well done. My ideal setup before eyeing the e-ink space was a linux-based netbook and occasional internet access to offload heavy compute to powerful servers. I could see using this sort of setup in a similar fashion.
Chromebook with linux installed?
Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life
#19Take my money. No, really, this is precisely the sort of thing I've wanted for ages, and I don't have the time or resources to build it myself.
I don't know if you've seen the videos, but the latency from input to result on the screen is, very, very bad. I don't think this is actually what you want.
We all want low-power retro computing but expect reasonable latency in usage. We also want WIFI working in every room and e-ink that doesn't suck and doesn't cost half a car... And the ability to browse the web (HTTPS). It's just not there yet.
When someone will make a product this good with all of the modern life "requirements", that will be a vastly successful product I imagine.
Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life
#20I think there is a class of device here that is missing. Low power but forever devices that have some basic functionality. Over time I could see this taking over laptops and the like as ultra-low-power became more and more capable.
Low power consumption. slap a small set of solar panels on there like Garmin watches, and possibly add a wireless power generator. I could see a device like that having standby battery measured in years.