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

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 200 posts

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

#101

Post by ctoth »

kstrauser wrote: post #79
tomrod wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit clunkier compared to a clean ARM or AMD linux install, but still more or less useful. Asus' eeePc was awesome!

I had an Eee PC 701. Pluses: the size was perfect . Minuses: everything else, from the CPU to the tiny drive to the tiny RAM to the keyboard to the trackpad was meh, at best. I'd love one with modern tech, long battery life, decent display quality, and long battery life. I don't care if it could only do text mode. That might even be ideal for my uses, which would primarily involve running Emacs and org-mode.

Check out GPD. I am typing this from a GPD Win Max and it's a lovely little x64 machine with 64 GB of RAM and a 7840U CPU (8 cores at 3.3 GHz) and ... it fits in a coat pocket. The battery life is okayish (~5 hours after 2 years?), but USB C charging means just buy extra battery packs.

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

#102

Post by jpk »

nine_k wrote: post #24
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.

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-in-particular would love to learn you've put ancient hardware and/or software on the network.

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

#104

Post by kstrauser »

ctoth wrote: post #101
kstrauser wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an Eee PC 701. Pluses: the size was perfect . Minuses: everything else, from the CPU to the tiny drive to the tiny RAM to the keyboard to the trackpad was meh, at best. I'd love one with modern tech, long battery life, decent display quality, and long battery life. I don't care if it could only do text mode. That might even be ideal for my uses, which would primarily involve running Emacs and org-mode.

Check out GPD. I am typing this from a GPD Win Max and it's a lovely little x64 machine with 64 GB of RAM and a 7840U CPU (8 cores at 3.3 GHz) and ... it fits in a coat pocket. The battery life is okayish (~5 hours after 2 years?), but USB C charging means just buy extra battery packs.

That's super cool! Thanks for the idea.

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

#105

Post by kstrauser »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #95
kstrauser wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the wrong form factor for me, though. A TRS-80 Model 100 with modern guts would be my ideal, but something like this but with a faster screen would be nearly a tie.

How about the ZeroWriter Ink? https://www.crowdsupply.com/zerowriter/zerowriter-ink The focus on the bundled firmware is word processing, but it's open-source and built around the popular ESP32 microcontroller family.

Wow, I love the looks of that. I have a Freewrite Alpha that's very similar at first glance, but it has a tiny LCD screen and isn't open source.

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

#106

Post by anthk »

tomrod wrote: post #4

Pretty 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.

I still use an n270 with OpenBSD, cwm, uxterm, mupdf and a bunch of cli/tui tools.

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

#107

Post by kiicia »

kstrauser wrote: post #87
redundantly wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I can tell, a partial refresh of the display (updating a smaller portion of the screen) performs less wear on the display than a full refresh, but it can still accumulate over time. Additionally some displays will require a full refresh after a certain number of partial refreshes to deal with ghosting.

Huh, interesting. I don't know anything about it, but my Kobo Libra has settings for how often to refresh the whole screen (e.g. every N pages, at the end of the chapter, etc.).

it does not matter in practice, let's say you do a full refresh once a second, it would take more than 11 days to do 1 million refreshes, if you do full refresh once a minute, it would take 2 years

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

#108

Post by morsch »

stephen_cagle wrote: post #100
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…

Out of curiosity how quickly could you log into wifi, check for whatever on the wifi, and turn off? Can you do that every 200 ms and have the wifi off most of the time? Is that what cell phones do already? Mostly just curious about minimizing energy usage due to wifi.

You stay associated, but other than that: yes.

Logging entirely out and back in every 200 ms would be bad, because associating is expensive and it probably takes longer than 200 ms, at least if you also want to do anything useful.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11e-2005#APSD

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

#109

Post by chii »

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.

> Low power but forever devices that have some basic functionality.

like paper? :D

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

#110

Post by numpad0 »

hliyan wrote: post #82
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.

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.

Killed UMPC, then killed by iPhone/iPad.
Post reply on HN