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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

#161

Post by bluGill »

jpk wrote: post #102
nine_k wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people sell or give away fully functional, very powerful mobile phones, because of the end of the software support. Hardware is more than capable for a long time, and is often very durable. But it takes a special kind of audience to put up with decade-old unsupported software, let alone with IBM XT-level software (which I remember using). Security is not a consideration for such devices, because of their very li…

> Security is not a consideration for such devices, because of their very limited number. Nobody is going to crack into your internet-connected Amiga except maybe some of your friends, as a prank. This depends pretty heavily on your threat model. You're right that a device like this is exceedingly unlikely to get exploited by attackers casting a wide net against common vulnerabilities. But an attacker targeting you-i…

Even if there are a lot of exploits on my Amiga (I don't own one, but work with me...), my value is likely low enough that it wouldn't be worth the cost to hack just me. If I was (or become) a major figure politically, militarily, or rich (maybe my 401k is that large - if you can get at it) it would be worth attacking me, but otherwise there are just not enough Amiga owners out there. Also you can expect someone with an Amiga is somewhat more likely than average to be protected - ransomware data and they restore from backups instead of pay. As such the value is exploiting Amiga is likely not high enough to be worth the cost.

Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life

#162

Post by dflock »

criddell wrote: post #144
hliyan wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On that note, whatever happened to netbooks? As someone who writes a lot and need a mobile device to do it on, they used to be perfect. Can't seem to find the form factor anymore. Even the smallest Chromebook seems only slightly smaller than a laptop.

What I want is a modern Tandy 102. Back in the 80's these things were getting days or even weeks of use on a set of AA batteries. I'd love to see a modern version of this - a low power, highly constrained device ( not running Linux), that runs on AA batteries. With modern components, you would think you could makes something like the 102 that lasts for months an AA batteries, but nobody has made one. The closest thin…

https://github.com/unkyulee/micro-journal

Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life

#163

Post by arde »

hypercube33 wrote: post #137
keyle wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Someone else mentioned a Transreflective screen. we used to get a whole week with a Motorola Dragonball 6800 CPU and one of those screens on two AA batteries.... I want palm pilot back personally. Best mobile games still to this day. That said a responsive x86 pocket top that also has a 5 day battery would be awesome too. Solar can change pretty quickly.

That would be a reimplementation of the venerable HP 95LX palmtop.

Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life

#165

Post by criddell »

dflock wrote: post #162
criddell wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I want is a modern Tandy 102. Back in the 80's these things were getting days or even weeks of use on a set of AA batteries. I'd love to see a modern version of this - a low power, highly constrained device ( not running Linux), that runs on AA batteries. With modern components, you would think you could makes something like the 102 that lasts for months an AA batteries, but nobody has made one. The closest thin…

https://github.com/unkyulee/micro-journal

That's pretty neat. It doesn't seem to hit the days or months of use on AA batteries constraint. That said, I didn't consider the ESP32 line of SBCs and now I'm looking into low power variants so thanks for pointing this out.

Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life

#166

Post by cestith »

fuzunoglu wrote: post #55

Powered by ESP32, which reportedly uses archaic 40nm technology. Aren't there some good ARM microprocessors built with 5nm technology, which would consume comparable power?

The brand new rp2350 from Raspberry Pi is also made on 40nm. Microcontrollers are often on 40nm or 32nm processes, but those processes didn’t stop being updated twenty years ago.

Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life

#167

Post by KennyBlanken »

patapong wrote: post #146
jmward01 wrote: post #15

I 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.

I agree! Ten years ago, we had netbooks with adequate performance for many tasks, and battery life of 10+ hours. Given the advances in CPUs since then, we should be able to pack similar performance onto much smaller CPUs, using much less power. Screens have also advanced since then. Where are the super thin and light laptops that allow me to write emails, do light coding and browsing and SSH into other devices with 5…

You don't need 50hr of battery life. If you're on a network, you're near power of some kind. Laptops these days use less than 10W in light usage and will run off anything with a USB power port.

This is a "solved problem" by the mainstream retail PC manufacturers...

Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life

#168

Post by JoelMcCracken »

I use my boox max lumi as a secondary display daily for working in emacs. The eink is great for text/terminal use, the only issue I have is when i sometimes need to do any kind of mouse work (which, is basically never, when I use it for what I said above).

What I really want is a low power linux laptop that is not entirely without CPU/memory power, so I can program some simple things on it. I don't mind if it has _less_ power, I can use ssh for anything that is overly cpu-hungry.

Ive seen several devices that seem like they might suit my need, but I look at them for long enough and just won't pull the trigger. Either it seems overly much like a walled garden (like, I can program on the device, but it doesn't seem like a suitable spot to write blog posts in emacs for my blog or whatever), or its just too underpowered and I'm sure that 99% of the tools I use already won't work on it.

I wish I had the EE knowledge/confidence to start hacking on this kind of thing. I think its very doable; I was just looking at e.g. https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/epaper-1/...

which is just cheap enough that I could see myself risking buying it without being sure that it will work with my other choices.

Nowadays, I feel like I should be able to run most of what I want on an android device that is built for power, and it should have a fairly long lasting battery because of its design; attach a trackpad, keyboard, and eink display, and my perfect device is here. I don't care if its not the thinnest device in the universe, a swappable battery (or, just load the thing with extra batteries) plus perhaps a portable solar charger would be amazing.

Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life

#169

Post by pineful »

JoelMcCracken wrote: post #168

I use my boox max lumi as a secondary display daily for working in emacs. The eink is great for text/terminal use, the only issue I have is when i sometimes need to do any kind of mouse work (which, is basically never, when I use it for what I said above). What I really want is a low power linux laptop that is not entirely without CPU/memory power, so I can program some simple things on it. I don't mind if it has _le…

Some other comment mentioned the pinenote which was shown on https://fosstodon.org/@carbonatedcaffeine/114208672145631483 a month ago. Sounds almost too good to be true, but I haven't tried it myself

Re: Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life

#170

Post by ianbicking »

codebje wrote: post #70
kovac wrote: post #22

Love it! Any idea how long the display can last? I've been playing around with e-paper (nothing as impressive as this!) dashboards. I use Waveshare displays that has a max of 1 million refresh cycles. The display you've used seems more capable. My own humble e-paper projects: https://www.asciimx.com/projects/e-reader/ https://www.asciimx.com/projects/etlas/

It's probably https://www.good-display.com/product/440.html which is also 1mil refresh cycles and a fast refresh time of 1.5sec - around 185 hours of screen updates, so ~3 months of 5hrs a day typing or a few years of e-reader style usage. I can't really see a device like this getting used super heavily every day, so expecting it to still be usable from time to time for a few years seems reasonable to me.

That seems like a really short lifespan...? Like you can use it for a couple years, but only if you don't actually use it.

There's an obvious aesthetic draw to e-ink, but it seems like passive-matrix monochrome LCD (like the Playdate) would be similarly power-efficient (or better [1]), longer lasting, usable in full daylight, and with better refresh rates.

How good are the best monochrome LCD screens now? Like... most reflective background and feel the flattest? (The vertical offset between the liquid and the background always bugs me.) Playdate (a Sharp Memory LCD [2]) seems pretty good but surprisingly low contrast. I suppose because the liquid crystal still blocks light even when its off? (I'm unclear here)

Looks like the OLPC transflective LCD screens are actually manufactured now [3] (5" display for $50 [4], maybe 10" but I'm skeptical [5]). The overall OLPC design was actually pretty great [6], even if many of the components weren't so great; it would be cool to see that revisited by some hobbyist.

[1] https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/403725

[2] https://www.adafruit.com/product/4694

[3] https://www.kingtechlcd.com/product-category/transflective-d...

[4] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/5-inch-transflective-...

[5] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/10-inch-1200-1600-Tra...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO

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