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Ashet Home Computer

ashet.computer

51–60 of 97 posts

Re: Ashet Home Computer

#51
post #42
post #11

There’s something to be said about an independent system you can understand and expand. What I think will be next frontier in home computing is truly understanding and owning the systems that run a smart home and that comes with understanding the environment (sensor data, presence detection, etc.). We live in an interesting time where embedded development has become so accessible and powerful that we can interface wi…

>We live in an interesting time where embedded development has become so accessible and powerful that we can interface with multiple wireless protocols and state of the art sensors with not a lot of capital investment. Even on Amazon the ESP32 is less than $5 - means like $1 in Shanghai. Various sensors (even the ones with Bluetooth connectivity) are similarly dirt cheap. You can have a bin of such components like yo…

You can only cover some very specific cases like that for robotics.

Also, besides some really huge companies, I would be nervous as a business to rely on a third party so much that I didn't have a workforce of my own.

Yes, it works for automotive (extremely consolidated sector with huge capital), or Amazon, or chipmakers... But they've already gone through that transition. Who else needs that?

Re: Ashet Home Computer

#52
post #42
post #11

There’s something to be said about an independent system you can understand and expand. What I think will be next frontier in home computing is truly understanding and owning the systems that run a smart home and that comes with understanding the environment (sensor data, presence detection, etc.). We live in an interesting time where embedded development has become so accessible and powerful that we can interface wi…

>We live in an interesting time where embedded development has become so accessible and powerful that we can interface with multiple wireless protocols and state of the art sensors with not a lot of capital investment. Even on Amazon the ESP32 is less than $5 - means like $1 in Shanghai. Various sensors (even the ones with Bluetooth connectivity) are similarly dirt cheap. You can have a bin of such components like yo…

I just bought a bunch of these and a reflow soldering gun.

The real bottleneck is getting custom pcbs made.

The best companies that do this are in China and soon will be tarrifed

Re: Ashet Home Computer

#53
This looks really interesting. I'd love to make something like this myself, from scratch, but I know I'd only get about 2 days into it before ADHD brain decided to do something else. Plus I'd be the only person who'd ever use it, and at that point it would be easier just to use a commercial PC. It could make a cool "cyberdeck" though. I'm already thinking about how I could do the bus stuff for the expansion cards, without having looked at the exact implementation details for this computer haha

Re: Ashet Home Computer

#54
post #25

> Fully understandable by a single person Riddle me this, Batman. What's the scope of "fully understandable?" How much of this home PC could be reasonably audited by individuals or small teams? I've got no exceptional opsec needs as an individual, but I spend some time wondering the minimum required resources to audit a PC. Looking through the docs I see cases where there are multiple suppliers for a recommended part…

I don't think it's really a fair claim in an educational context. There are at least two completely modern computers (which I assume means fairly complex) including the Raspberry PI and another one he is using the the bus or something. I just don't think modern CPUs really quite fit the claim of "fully understandable by a single person". I mean maybe technically but that is misleading in an educational context where…

That's a Raspberry Pi Pico. Very different platform to the Raspberry Pi proper, and a lot closer to being "understandable" in its entirety.

Re: Ashet Home Computer

#55

This looks really interesting. I'd love to make something like this myself, from scratch, but I know I'd only get about 2 days into it before ADHD brain decided to do something else. Plus I'd be the only person who'd ever use it, and at that point it would be easier just to use a commercial PC. It could make a cool "cyberdeck" though. I'm already thinking about how I could do the bus stuff for the expansion cards, wi…

Creator here!

I'm also having ADHD but you can get help with the focus problem ;)

It's incredible to work for many years on the same thing and it's so pleasing to have steady progress.

So: Go, start building a vision for your cyberdeck! Having a clear goal helps you working towards building it, and you cam embrace the ADHD by jumping around between the many aspects of such a project.

sw design, hw design, visual design, mechanical design, handcrafting, soldering, programming, making websites, asking people, ...

Re: Ashet Home Computer

#56
post #55

This looks really interesting. I'd love to make something like this myself, from scratch, but I know I'd only get about 2 days into it before ADHD brain decided to do something else. Plus I'd be the only person who'd ever use it, and at that point it would be easier just to use a commercial PC. It could make a cool "cyberdeck" though. I'm already thinking about how I could do the bus stuff for the expansion cards, wi…

Creator here! I'm also having ADHD but you can get help with the focus problem ;) It's incredible to work for many years on the same thing and it's so pleasing to have steady progress. So: Go, start building a vision for your cyberdeck! Having a clear goal helps you working towards building it, and you cam embrace the ADHD by jumping around between the many aspects of such a project. sw design, hw design, visual desi…

Haha, I've been trying to get help with the focus problem for a while now :P It's gone on my infinite todo list of projects, and maybe I'll get around to it one day, but its true that it would exercise lots of different brain parts.

The most interesting part to me right now is running Zig on a microcontroller, since that's something I really wanted to do this year (like a new year's resolution thing). I've been interested in Zig for a while, but I've never done any serious learning/programming with it, so I might look at your OS repo to at least gain some inspiration on how deploying to a microcontroller works.

It also seems like it would be a really good way to learn embedded electronics in general, since if I wanted to learn something new, eg lower level network programming, I could make and program a network card, or usb hosting, or anything like that.

I'll definitely try to do it one day, once I've finished all my current projects haha

Re: Ashet Home Computer

#57
post #11

There’s something to be said about an independent system you can understand and expand. What I think will be next frontier in home computing is truly understanding and owning the systems that run a smart home and that comes with understanding the environment (sensor data, presence detection, etc.). We live in an interesting time where embedded development has become so accessible and powerful that we can interface wi…

> What I think will be next frontier in home computing is truly understanding and owning the systems that run a smart home and that comes with understanding the environment (sensor data, presence detection, etc.)

That's gonna be a while coming - we're now entering a stage where we won't even understand the code that gets written.

Now, sure, some holdouts will understand the code, but that's not going to be the norm soon.

Re: Ashet Home Computer

#59

Not ragging on the author, but I'm always confused whenever I see a "make your own computer" project like this that doesn't start with hardware first. I mean, there's already seems to be a quite advanced OS for it and some detailed docs, but no physical "computer" to speak of, just a lot of mockups. Why a hardware project at that point and not a virtual machine like pico-8? I'm just saying, its kinda the opposite app…

https://ashet.computer/hardware/ looks like hardware to me. While not all the manufacturing considerations have been addressed, there's a "functional cable clutter prototype ", and you can build your own Ashet-compatible.

That all looks like renders and diagrams to me. Dime a dozen, as has been said.

https://ashet.computer/gallery/img/ashet-hc-devsetup-02.jpg looks like hardware!

Re: Ashet Home Computer

#60

"Compiled languages can be used externally" I realize that 8MB of RAM seems absurdly small to modern audiences, but I can assure you that I ran early versions of Turbo Pascal and compiled fine with 64K.

Yeah, but Turbo Pascal was also a small language with limited size of binaries (remember overlays?).
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