Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ashet Home Computer

ashet.computer

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–97 of 97 posts

Re: Ashet Home Computer

#91

Post by poulpy123 »

tuckerman wrote: post #2

He's still too young for something like this but I've been searching for something to use when we more properly introduce my son to computers. Using modern components to make something useful that still exposes the electronics side, encourages tinkering and exploration over media consumption, etc and it seems like a project like this could fit the bill nicely!

I think machines are more for adults and passionate teenagers than for children. But you can also look at the tulip creative computer that is more geared towards creative computing (especially music)

Re: Ashet Home Computer

#92

Post by rollcat »

ikskuh wrote: post #90
rollcat wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OS looks highly opinionated and I respect that. Better to have a single overarching vision than try to do too many things poorly. However I will question some design choices! - 32-bit only: the writing is on the wall, many vendors (HW&SW) are slowly moving to kill it off. I guess it's fine, but IMHO each ISA (regardless of pointer width) should just be considered a different ISA. Portability is good, it ensures y…

Creator here! Yes, the OS is highly opinionated, as just making another linux is incredibly boring for me! The 32-bit only constraint is mainly due to my focus on smaller architectures, especially microcontrollers. x86_64 and aarch64 both have much more complex initialiastion schemes, and also use much more complex page table setups. Thus, i wanted to keep that out of the system, considering i'm targeting systems wit…

> considering the system reboots in 1.2 s

That's not the point - it's about usability. You'd be constantly losing work.

> Just killing off a hanging process that doesnt yield [...]

<3 !

Re: Ashet Home Computer

#93

Post by lysace »

spott wrote: post #72
lysace wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Parallax P8X32A Propeller (2006) did multi-core processing in a very beginner friendly way. It can be done - if you take a holistic approach to hardware + runtime + development environment. The Propeller probably failed because of the custom language, the custom assembly syntax, the custom ISA, the custom IDE font (!) etc. It was a very neat system though.

The propeller 2 is going to be used as the south bridge for the Ashet.

Nice!

Re: Ashet Home Computer

#94

Post by olelele »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #52
trhway wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

Learn how to roll (etch) your own?

For limited applications it's really not that difficult :)

Re: Ashet Home Computer

#95

Post by LarsDu88 »

olelele wrote: post #94
LarsDu88 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Learn how to roll (etch) your own? For limited applications it's really not that difficult :)

Too many chemicals. Not nearly worth the time when you can order from JLPCB for $4 a board

Re: Ashet Home Computer

#96

Post by aa-jv »

ikskuh wrote: post #79
aa-jv wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considered the effort required to add Lua support to the platform? At least eLua would fit and probably provide a great environment for onboard development (i.e. non-crosscompiling...)

Lua is planned! It's an interpreted language with a lightweight compiler which is one of the next things on the "large scale" todo list!

Ah, that is great news and bumps up my motivation to get involved. Will keep an eye on things, thanks for the info!

Re: Ashet Home Computer

#97

Post by aa-jv »

ikskuh wrote: post #75
aa-jv wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually this thing would be a lot sexier if it were in fact complying with Eurorack standards, imho. There's no better environment to be dropping an alternative computing platform than directly into the rack alongside the rest of the interesting modules of the 21st century ..

Creator here! I did consider Euro Rack, 19" racks, MiniATX and other case standards. But with any of these options, i wouldnt be able to keep the price low. The case including all parts and assembly cost is roughly at 20€ per device. It's an off-the-shelf part, with only lasercutted parts in two materials, and a single custom component which is yet to be determined what's the cheapest manufacturing option. I wanted t…

I can buy a small Eurorack module box for 25eu, including power supply and handles.

So .. I dunno .. just seems like with a bit of extra design work, Ashet could become Eurorack compatible at least, for those of us who want to hack it into that environment.

But anyway, I see you are quite busy with other issues, I'll pipe down about it.

Post reply on HN