171–180 of 200 posts
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.
Just jailbreak your eink Kindle?
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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.
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For e-ink, does the refresh count include the entire screen or individual pixels?
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.
what's the rationale for x86? To run vintage software? I would love an eink laptop like this but with ARM, modern ports and linux
Sounds reasonable. In an off-grid situation, best to stick with software written before the mid-2000s.
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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.
If you want low power, try the nRF52 series of chips (e.g. nRF52840). Much less power hungry than the ESP32 with a comparable ARM core. Only Bluetooth though - no WiFi. nRF52840 sensors can run for months on a single CR2032 coin cell, and the power consumption while running is lower too.
Just what George R.R. Martin could use if his actual XT ever went kaputski.
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Fully upgraded, my XT had VGA, 1MB including extended memory shenanigans, a sound card, a SCSI card, and Ethernet.
I threw in a VGA, and dual 20Mb hard disks. 10Mhz, v20 and 8087 FPU. Dual 6550 serial card, great for modem, over kill for a mouse. A $9 sound card that was AdLib compatible on one chip.
Weird times.
Eventually, someone donated a board with an AMD 386SX-33, which I immediately overclocked to 40MHz. Things became a lot different after that.
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I'm not even sure why you would point this out. I'm also quite certain there were also no USB flash drives, SD card support, Wifi networking and e-ink displays in the early 1990s. It's not a replica in any way, it does not claim to be that. Just a cool compute device!
What does clone mean?
"I built an XT 'clone' [that doesn't even target the same CPU as an XT]"
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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
Those numbers don't seem high, at all, for me. Typing would probably cause a refresh more often than every second and even if it's delayed to be once, every second, it's still only 11 days.
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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...
Unless you're not, because you're using an LTE modem, or inflight wifi on an aircraft without in-seat power, or any of a number of other real world scenarios.