[HN Gopher] The first RISC-V portable computer is now available
___________________________________________________________________
The first RISC-V portable computer is now available
Author : josteink
Score : 167 points
Date : 2022-03-15 18:28 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lunduke.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lunduke.substack.com)
| kragen wrote:
| This seems like an inspiring step in the direction of a device
| that I want, but which as far as I can tell, doesn't exist, but I
| have one burning question:
|
| _How small is it?_
|
| I've been trying to figure out what I need for comfortable
| portable writing. I have an Aspire One that's pretty much at the
| lower limit for key spacing for my hands, with 17 mm x 16 mm
| keys. I'm typing this on a cheap USB external keyboard with keys
| closer to 18.5 mm wide, and I think slightly tighter spacing
| would be more comfortable. I might be able to make do with 15 mm
| or even 14 mm horizontal key spacing, but my fingers would
| collide. Someone with smaller hands could manage a slightly
| smaller keyboard, but not that much smaller. Touchtyping becomes
| impossible and you're reduced to typing with two fingers like a
| five-year-old.
|
| Unfortunately none of
| https://artvsentropy.wordpress.com/2022/01/15/writing-on-the...
| https://lunduke.substack.com/p/the-first-risc-v-portable-com...
| https://www.clockworkpi.com/product-page/devterm-kit-r01 bothers
| to give any dimensions at all, even when they spend a lot of time
| talking about how small it is.
|
| From my point of view, this is more important than the
| information they _did_ give, and it seems like it was pretty
| important to them too, so I don 't understand why they omitted
| this information.
|
| What I want is:
|
| 1. A computer powerful enough to recompile all its own software,
|
| 2. which can run a reasonably convenient programming environment
| (my bar is pretty low here: at least as good as Emacs with GCC on
| a VAX with a VT100, or MPW on a Macintosh SE),
|
| 3. which fits in my pocket,
|
| 4. which doesn't need batteries or plugging in,
|
| 5. which I can recover if I corrupt its filesystem, and
|
| 6. which is usable in direct sunlight.
|
| This laptop fulfills points #1, #2, and #5. My cellphone fulfills
| points #2, #3, and #6. My solar calculator fulfills points #3,
| #4, #5 (trivially), and #6. It looks like this "DevTerm" fulfills
| points #1, #2, and #5, same as my current laptop but maybe
| slightly more portable. But I don't think any computing device
| exists, or ever has existed, that hits all of these points. But I
| think it's attainable now.
|
| I think the conjunction of points #2 and #3 probably requires the
| thing to unfold or deploy somehow, unless some kind of Twiddler-
| like device would allow me to do it one-handed. There just isn't
| room for both of my hands at once on the surface of things that
| fit in my pocket (about 100 mm x 120 mm). Conceivably a laser
| projection keyboard could work.
| unwind wrote:
| * which doesn't need batteries or plugging in *
|
| So, uh, it has to be solar powered _only_? That sounds
| fantastically niche and not like something someone would want
| to design /build.
|
| I think any reasonable "work" performance level would require
| too large an area of solar cells in order to be practical,
| especially if it should work indoors.
| kragen wrote:
| Solar power does seem like the most reasonable option,
| although other possibilities include energy harvesting from
| keyboard interaction, piezoelectric shoe soles like those
| that drive those LED-flashing shoes, or a pullstring. You
| need some energy storage, but at low power levels a modern
| ceramic capacitor is more than adequate in between pullstring
| pulls or whatever. Many of my earlier notes on the topic are
| in https://dercuano.github.io/notes/keyboard-powered-
| computers.... and https://dercuano.github.io/topics/energy-
| harvesting.html; more recent ones are in
| http://canonical.org/~kragen/derctuo and
| http://canonical.org/~kragen/dernocua.
|
| But last year I learned about two innovations that have been
| brought to market that dramatically increase the potential
| abilities of such a device.
|
| -- *** --
|
| It's entirely possible that your definition of 'any
| reasonable "work" performance level' is orders of magnitude
| higher than my "reasonably convenient programming
| environment". The VAX reference point is 1 Dhrystone MIPS,
| and the Macintosh SE (a 7.8 MHz 68000) was also about 1
| Dhrystone MIPS. Current ARM7 Cortex designs deliver about 2
| Dhrystone MIPS per MHz, so we're talking about 500kHz of ARM7
| instructions here.
|
| Without any fancy circuitry at all I was able to squeeze 8 mW
| out of a 38-mm-square solar panel from a dollar-store garden
| light, in direct sunlight. Theory predicts it should be
| capable of 200+ mW (16% efficiency, 1000 W/m2) so hopefully I
| can get better results out of other panels. The amorphous
| solar panels normally used on solar calculators, which work
| well indoors as well as in direct sunlight, are nominally
| about 10% efficient, which is to say, 10 mW/cm2 in direct
| sunlight or 100 mW/cm2 in office lighting. It's easy to
| imagine dedicating 30 cm2 of surface area to solar panels,
| which would give you 300 mW outdoors or 3 mW indoors. (38 mm
| square is 14 cm2. 30 cm2 in medieval units is about 4 5/8
| square inches, depending on which inch you use.)
|
| -- *** --
|
| So, what kind of computer can you run on a milliwatt or so?
|
| Ambiq sells an ultra-low-power Cortex-M4F called Apollo3 Blue
| with 1MiB Flash plus 384 KiB RAM; the datasheet claims that,
| when fully active, at 3.3 volts, it uses 68 mA plus 10 mA per
| MHz running application code, and it runs at up to 48 MHz
| bursting to 96 MHz. So at, say, 10 MHz (20 VAXen or Macintosh
| SEs), it should use 170 mA or 550 mW. At 48 MHz (100 VAXen or
| Mac SEs), 550 mA or 1.8 mW. I haven't tested it yet. SparkFun
| sells a devboard for US$22 at
| https://www.sparkfun.com/products/15444.
|
| Remembering, of course, that benchmarks are always pretty
| bogus, we can still roughly approximate this 20 DMIPS
| performance level as being roughly the processing speed of a
| 386/40, 486/25, or SPARC 2, and the 200 DMIPS peak as being
| roughly the processing speed of a Pentium Pro, PowerMac 7100,
| or SPARC 20 -- but with enormously less RAM, an enormously
| lower-latency "disk", and a lower bandwidth budget for the
| disk. And no MMU, so no fork() and no demand-paged
| executables. You do get memory protection, hardware floating
| point, and saturating arithmetic, but no MMX-like SIMD
| instructions.
|
| -- *** --
|
| If the computer's _output_ isn 't going to be just an
| earphone or something, though, you may need to spend
| substantial energy on a screen as well. Sharp makes a 400x240
| "memory LCD" display (0.1 megapixels) used in, for example,
| Panic's Playdate handheld game console
| (https://youtu.be/uziFTK5c29k) which seems like it should
| enable submilliwatt personal computing; the datasheet says it
| uses 175 mW when being constantly updated with a worst-case
| update pattern at its maximum of 20 Hz. Adafruit sells a
| breakout board for the display for US$45:
| https://www.adafruit.com/product/4694
|
| A VT100's character cell was 8x10
| (https://sudonull.com/post/30508-Recreating-CRT-Fonts), so
| its 80x25 screen was 640x250, 0.16 megapixels, while the
| Macintosh SE was 512x342, 0.18 megapixels. Both of them were
| 1 bit deep: a pixel was either on or off. So two of these LCD
| screens together gives you more pixels than either of these
| two reference-point computers. However, the pixels are
| physically a lot smaller, which may compromise readability.
| (On the other hand, as you can see from the Playdate videos,
| you can do a lot of things on this display that a VT100 or
| Mac SE could never dream of doing because of lack of compute
| and RAM.)
|
| -- *** --
|
| So, I think it's eminently feasible now, although it probably
| wasn't feasible ten years ago. But it's going to be a
| challenge; I can't just compile Linux and fire up Vim. Even
| if Linux could run on these super-low-power computers, they
| don't have enough memory to recompile it.
| int_19h wrote:
| We compiled C code just fine on machines with less than a
| megabyte of RAM back in DOS days. I wouldn't expect gcc to
| work on such a machine, but some older compiler (lcc? pcc?)
| should be feasible.
| phil294 wrote:
| I really don't understand everyone's obsession with mobile
| computing power. Why aren't we equipping our our laptops with
| low energy processors and use them to remotely access more
| powerful stationary work stations via networking? Instead of
| carrying around 4.8 GHz all the time, I'd much rather have
| multiple days of battery lifetime. We must have taken a wrong
| step somewhere. I am still convinced processing outsourcing is
| the future for all things hardware intensive such as gaming, if
| it is not for some unexpected milestone in battery technology.
|
| Besides,
|
| > 4. which doesn't need batteries or plugging in
|
| what do you mean by that? Would that include only solar-powered
| devices?
| kragen wrote:
| See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30691361 for notes
| on energy sources. I'm open to alternatives to solar.
|
| I agree that making computing power mobile makes it
| enormously more expensive, especially if you consider
| batteries unacceptable. But making computing power remote
| means that you need to spend energy on a radio to access it.
| That's a good tradeoff for some things, but not for others.
| In my other comment, note that if we believe Ambiq's
| datasheet, we can get the CPU speed of a SPARC 20 for 1.8
| milliwatts.
|
| It turns out the chip also includes a Bluetooth Low Energy 5
| radio, so you can use it to remotely access more powerful
| stationary workstations via networking, as long as you're
| within a few meters of a base station. The radio costs 10
| milliwatts when you're running it, six times as much as the
| Pentium-class CPU. Normal radios (Wi-Fi, cellphones) cost
| orders of magnitude more than that.
|
| So constant remote _wireless_ access to more powerful
| stationary workstations doesn 't start to _save_ energy until
| the amount of computation you 're accessing is close to a
| gigaflop. Maybe closer to a teraflop if we're talking about
| streaming full-motion video. Intermittent remote access, of
| course, is a more reasonable proposition.
|
| It's true that gaming commonly uses teraflops or petaflops of
| computing power, and plugging in such a beast in a server
| closet is a huge improvement over trying to somehow cram it
| into your pocket. But there are a lot of day-to-day things
| _I_ do with a computer -- recompiling my text editor, writing
| stupid comments on internet message boards, chatting on IRC,
| simulating an analog circuit, reading Wikipedia -- that very
| much do not require gigaflops of computing power.
|
| (Remote _wired_ access of course can use very little power
| indeed, but if you 're in a position to plug into a wire, you
| might as well deliver power over that wire too.)
|
| If you take a modern cellphone and take almost all the
| processing power out of it, you still have a 1000-milliwatt
| radio and a 1000-milliwatt backlit screen. So you aren't
| going to get multiple days of battery life that way. 1000
| milliwatts is enough to pay for dozens of gigaflops of
| computing power nowadays.
|
| Myself, I have another reason: I travel, though I've traveled
| very little during the pandemic. But I am often someplace
| other than at home: at a cafe, in a park, at the office, in a
| bus, in the subway, in a taxi, visiting a friend in another
| city, at my in-laws' house, and so on. All of these places
| are out of Bluetooth range of my house. I could obtain
| internet bandwidth from a commercial provider, but that
| sacrifices privacy, it's never reliable, and I don't consider
| it reasonable to make my core exocortical functions dependent
| on the day-to-day vagaries of mere commerce. Personal
| autonomy is one of my core values.
| Maursault wrote:
| I think this is neat, but it is either too expensive or it is
| underpowered for the price. I think if you bought a 7th Gen iPod
| Touch, available since April 2019, and jailbroke it, and added a
| bluetooth keyboard, you'd have a far more powerful computer (A10
| chip has _two_ high performance cores @1.64Ghz plus two more
| efficiency cores) for about the same price, plus you 'd also
| still have an iPod and mobile Safari.
| dijit wrote:
| But. It wouldn't be riscv. Which is the unique selling point.
| Not the power.
| detaro wrote:
| First iteration _and_ niche nerd product is obviously going to
| be more expensive.
| Koshkin wrote:
| For some reason I hate it when the Fn key is the first key on the
| left. (What I hate even more is that laptop manufacturers have no
| agreement on this.)
| spullara wrote:
| Why? Do you use the Fn key all the time? I sent my Dell laptop
| back because the ctrl key was on the left and an unremappable
| Fn key was where ctrl is supposed to be.
| sixothree wrote:
| Control key has been bottom left key on most keyboards for 40
| years now.
| spullara wrote:
| The problem isn't the CTRL key on the bottom left. The
| problem is the Fn key being useless and taking up a spot at
| all. Mac has this right.
| int_19h wrote:
| Fn is not useless on keyboards that don't have a
| dedicated function key row.
| kupfer wrote:
| I press Ctrl+Shift+C/V quite often and it's for me it's
| easier to do with the left hand only when Ctrl is below
| Shift.
| fouc wrote:
| I imagine the macbook keyboard is fine in this situation
| because ctrl key is still directly below the shift key.
| solarexplorer wrote:
| I like to remap Caps Lock to Control to get a similar
| layout as the old Sun keyboards. It also makes pressing the
| Control key a lot easier.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| If you have a real keyboard you can use the pad of your
| hand to hit the control key in the bottom left corner,
| which some people find even easier. This is definitely
| the easiest way to hit Ctrl-Q.
| macintux wrote:
| Apple too. Was a sad day when Sun and Apple gave up that
| fight.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| It also screws up my muscle memory. I hate the way
| ThinkPads do this too. At least you can remap them there
| too, but in some cases my work had the bios menu locked
| down :(
| [deleted]
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| I'm the exact opposite - I wish more of them put it on the
| left! Especially with smaller keyboards where you need it to
| access certain keys.
| candyman wrote:
| Man that's ugly.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| It looks a lot like the TRS-80 Model 100:
|
| https://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/trs80-model100/
| cduzz wrote:
| Unfortunately, although it looks like a TRS-80 100/102, or a
| wp2, it is actually enough smaller that it looks like you
| wouldn't be able to type on it.
|
| I'd buy something like this if it were the size of a normal
| keyboard (and as long as it cost less than 300, oh, and as long
| as it has 4gb of ram. yeah, probably I'm not actually the
| target market).
| jgtrosh wrote:
| I've used my DevTerm for a while, and the keyboard is
| definitely small. You get better using it after some time,
| but the key size and the unorthodox key placement due to size
| constraints does make it more of a toy than an actual "dev
| term". That's fine for me since I didn't have any serious use
| planned for it: I'm currently using it as a text game
| terminal with TTY duplication on the thermal printer. That's
| pretty fun to hand out to friends to introduce them to some
| retro computing, but I wouldn't advocate the device as a
| serious computing platform.
| kragen wrote:
| How many millimeters across and tall is the keyboard?
| bragr wrote:
| >To be among the first to use an open source, RISC-V CPU in a
| regular computer? A portable one, no less?! To be a pioneer of a
| more open hardware future? That sounds like an absolute
| privilege.
|
| Is this an actual open source processor? I can't find any info on
| it either way. A lot of the conversation around RISC-V seems to
| conflate the open source nature of the ISA with the the actual
| implementation. Even the reference implementations are BSD
| licensed so people are allowed to distribute proprietary
| derivatives to say nothing of completely proprietary
| implementations.
|
| If all or most of the implementations are propriety, I feel like
| it is a mostly lateral move from ARM as, although it is not open
| source, the ARM ISA is readily available [1], and the same kinds
| of rarified CPU engineering and academic circles that will have
| influence in the RISC-V Foundation, already influence ARM.
|
| [1] https://developer.arm.com/architectures/cpu-
| architecture/a-p...
| mnd999 wrote:
| The BSD license is definitely open source. It's just not 'free
| software' in the FSF sense.
| snvzz wrote:
| BSD license absolutely is "free software" in the FSF sense.
| The four freedoms are guaranteed by it, and it is even listed
| explicitly in their list of free software licenses.
| snvzz wrote:
| >Is this an actual open source processor?
|
| AIUI the SoC is not open, but the CPU design it contains,
| XuanTie C906, is.
|
| It would even be decent if it had standard V extension, but
| sadly it uses an incompatible pre-standard draft.
| api wrote:
| This looks just like the venerable Tandy 100!
|
| http://www.oldcomputers.net/trs100.html
|
| That can't be a coincidence.
| willcipriano wrote:
| I've got the A04 model (ARM). Its more of something to play with
| than anything else. I keep it by my bed for fooling around with
| my side projects in the night.
| snvzz wrote:
| I'll skip this one, and wait for RVA22-compliant devices.
|
| This machine uses the Allwinner D1 SoC, which is pre-standard V,
| incompatible with the standard V extension ratified in December.
| mhh__ wrote:
| $239 is a lot of money for a meme. The processor looks just as
| closed as a raspberry pi
| rjsw wrote:
| The processor avoids being closed by not having a GPU.
| mhh__ wrote:
| So where's the RTL for the processor then?
| ggreg84 wrote:
| +1. Asking the right questions.
| kragen wrote:
| The RTL is on GitHub under the Apache2 license:
| https://github.com/T-head-Semi/openc906
|
| Yocto project in https://github.com/T-head-Semi/xuantie-
| yocto
| mhh__ wrote:
| Ok looks like I was wrong.
|
| Is the openc906 definitely the same design as the one in
| the D1? It looks like it is but I have been bitten by xyz
| vs. open-xyz subtlety before.
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| The openc906 is just the CPU core, however (and the
| released C906 Verilog code might have some updates and
| bugfixes compared to the silicon in the D1).
|
| The English datasheet and user manual for the D1 are
| available at https://linux-sunxi.org/D1
|
| However, some of the peripheral hardware (such as the
| video unit/frame buffer) is not documented and the
| documentation for the C906 CPU core itself is only
| available in Chinese.
| kragen wrote:
| Chinese is the command line of the 21st century. I've had
| the same difficulty with CKS32 datasheets.
| kragen wrote:
| I don't know for sure; even if it purportedly is, there's
| probably no way to verify that no hardware backdoors have
| been inserted, if that's your concern. And rebuilding the
| CPU with your desired modifications would require signing
| the appropriate agreements with your fab provider of
| choice and probably a million dollars or so over a year
| or two. Still, you could probably do cycle-accurate
| simulations on an FPGA at a lower clock speed, if that's
| what you're into.
|
| https://www.hackster.io/news/mangopi-mq1-is-an-ultra-
| compact... claims the Allwinner D1 "is" the "XuanTie
| C906, which Alibaba's T-Head division recently released
| under the permissive Apache 2.0 open source license." But
| of course the author could be mistaken about that.
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| You can integrate the C910 (should work for the C906 as
| well) in Olof Kindgren's FuseSoC tool, see https://twitte
| r.com/OlofKindgren/status/1451654866837938186
| snvzz wrote:
| AIUI while C906 is open, the D1 SoC is not.
| pelasaco wrote:
| $239 + 60 business days
| humanwhosits wrote:
| Who built the cpu itself? It's interesting that it claims
| V-extension support, even though that was only just ratified
| mhh__ wrote:
| Allwinner, the core is a XuanTie C906 I think.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| Allwinner D1: https://linux-sunxi.org/D1 - SoC based on XuanTie
| C906.
| mhh__ wrote:
| The vector extension was implemented in industry based on the
| draft rather than waiting until ratification AFAIK
| WillFlux wrote:
| The keyboard seems to be the weakness of the DevTerm, which is a
| shame. This review was typical:
|
| "The keyboard is just OK. To be honest, it was the only part of
| the device I was a bit disappointed about. The keys are small,
| not spaced apart enough, and can be hard to press." [1]
|
| [1] https://artvsentropy.wordpress.com/2022/01/15/writing-on-
| the...
| ad8e wrote:
| The key positions are also different from a normal keyboard:
| all rows are shifted by 1/4, whereas a QWERTY keyboard has 1/2
| shifts between rows 1-Q and A-Z, and 1/4 between Q-A.
|
| From a psychological UX perspective, I'd prefer 1/2 shifts
| between all the rows, creating a hex grid.
|
| Ortho is also logical and justifiable, although its packing is
| worse than hex.
|
| But if convention is to be broken, it should not be the 1/4
| that this product has chosen, which offers no benefit and
| creates an unfamiliarity cost. Better to stick with the
| standard key positions than this.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Trackpad isn't fantastic either, it's unusable out of the box
| but the community made a patch that makes it mostly ok.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Haha just like the pinebook pro.
|
| I've actually got an atom based PC that uses the exact same
| chassis and trackpad as the pinebook pro, and I've been
| trying to use the same community firmware. Because it is
| indeed horrible by default. Random touches, scrolling instead
| of pointing etc. No palm rekection at all.
|
| Unfortunately I never managed to get it to install :(
| willcipriano wrote:
| Sorry, trackball rather than trackpad.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Another similar device, although more powerful and more
| interesting hardware-wise, would be the Pocket Popcorn Computer,
| which unfortunately still hasn't provided any proof of being a
| real product other than shiny 3D renders.
|
| https://pocket.popcorncomputer.com/
|
| Edit: I stand corrected, totally missed the blog posts and the
| videos, happy to see I was wrong; the pandemic has been hard for
| many businesses unfortunately. If I may, they should put
| something on the homepage too however, as I recall monitoring it
| from time to time since probably over two years and it never
| showed that there were working prototypes. This would help to
| fuel interest.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| > still hasn't provided any proof of being a real product other
| than shiny 3D renders
|
| There are pictures and videos of development devices on
| Twitter; for example:
| https://twitter.com/gajjar04akash1/status/148444172903842611...
| floren wrote:
| I went to school with Alan and Jose, and I believe they're
| honestly doing their best to get a real product out there. The
| company blog (https://blog.popcorncomputer.com/) indicates that
| they should be shipping to the earliest purchasers very soon.
| mrtweetyhack wrote:
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| This is certainly dead on arrival, right? Nobody wants or has
| ever wanted a computer with a screen flush with the keyboard.
| This was even known in the late 90s:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jornada_(PDA)#Jornada_720
|
| Maybe someone can hack a longer flexible ribbon cable and a
| hinge? And sell it as an aftermarket kit? Please? (The thing
| looks pretty cool otherwise).
| sp332 wrote:
| They've been selling terminals with a similar form factor (and
| a different internals) for a couple years now.
| bitwize wrote:
| > This is certainly dead on arrival, right? Nobody wants or has
| ever wanted a computer with a screen flush with the keyboard.
|
| The Tandy 100, whose design inspired this machine, was very
| popular among journalists as a note taking machine.
| kragen wrote:
| Yeah, I saw a reporter typing up a sports story on a TRS-80
| Model 100 in a Wendy's in San Mateo in 01996, 13 years after
| the machine's release. I think it had been discontinued for
| many years at that point.
|
| They're still around but I haven't seen one since then.
| gswdh wrote:
| hnthrowaway0315 wrote:
| >Now to see if I can convince my wife to let me buy one.
|
| Exactly what I'm thinking.
| colordrops wrote:
| > it's hard to not immediately fall head over heels
|
| No doubt, because you're going to be cricking your neck over to
| look at the thing. Looks painful.
| submeta wrote:
| Does it run Emacs? :)
| kragen wrote:
| Evidently it runs LibreOffice and Vim, so I can't imagine Emacs
| would be any problem:
| https://artvsentropy.wordpress.com/2022/01/15/writing-on-the...
| nathanasmith wrote:
| It appears that device isn't using the RISC-V module under
| discussion but an ARM version instead.
|
| >I decided to install in my DevTerm the simplest module
| compatible with the popular RaspberryPi Linux distribution.
| It's slower than the other "cores" but less power-hungry, and
| it's very simple to install pre-compiled software and look up
| answers for any questions (as the RaspberryPi community is so
| huge). Yet this core still gives the user an ARM64-bit Quad-
| Core Cortex-A53 1.2 GHz CPU and 1 GB of RAM -- more than
| enough to run simple writing apps.
| lizardactivist wrote:
| Very cool little thing, and it looks like something straight out
| of a sci-fi movie.
| amelius wrote:
| What does it cost to make a case and keyboard like that? I guess
| they used injection molding?
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| Yes, it's injection molded. Here you can see some of the mold
| sprues that come with the kit:
| https://static.wixstatic.com/media/3833f7_352ac21900e64720a5...
| Splendor wrote:
| Direct link to the computer in question:
| https://www.clockworkpi.com/product-page/devterm-kit-r01
| civilized wrote:
| The design looks like it's from the 80s or earlier. Is this some
| sort of nostalgia thing?
| Elidrake42 wrote:
| The article links to the inspiration in the second paragraph:
| https://lunduke.substack.com/p/the-last-programming-project-...
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| looks awesome as a toy but a bit impractical for traveling with.
| Would be an instant buy when its available in a pinebook pro form
| factor.
| jjice wrote:
| "Awesome toy" is a good way to put it. Very neat, but not
| practical for me. Really excited to see some RISC-V stuff
| though.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| Looking at some videos, overall my impression is that it's too
| large to be very portable, but too small to be truly usable.
| The device sits in a bit of a size "dead zone" where it has the
| worst aspects of all form factors.
| dogecoinbase wrote:
| The module is available on its own, and cheap enough that I
| picked one up to try in a different rPi compute module host
| board: https://www.clockworkpi.com/product-page/copy-of-
| clockworkpi...
|
| Hopefully it works!
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| awesome was hopin to avoid the keyboard and stuff i dont need
| so this is perfect
| sylware wrote:
| IMHO, for devs, a modular laptop would be more appropriate: a
| display panel, a CPU/GPU box, mouse/keyboard, a battery pack...
| and the bag designed to carry those components.
| snek_case wrote:
| What could be really cool is a lunchbox portable computer with
| a keyboard that closes on the front:
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/befuddledsenses/493303864
|
| I think you could make it pretty small but still large enough
| to fit two small PCI-express cards and replaceable/upgradeable
| RAM modules. It would be a good format for tinkerers, very
| amenable to having replaceable parts and being user-
| serviceable. Throw some GPIO in there and you would have a real
| winner for the maker crowd.
|
| EDIT: someone build this lunchbox portable with a raspberry pi
| and it looks really awesome:
| https://hackaday.com/2020/06/09/lunchbox-cyberdeck-is-a-tast...
| rileyphone wrote:
| Check out the Pockit that was on here a few days ago:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3F9OtH2Xx4&list=UU49EYw900L...
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| What's the significance of RISC-V?
|
| Easier to write compiler backends for? Faster? Simpler?
| RyJones wrote:
| Open source ISA - no licensing fees.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| What does that mean in practice - easier for people to
| manufacture hardware for them?
| RyJones wrote:
| Yes. You don't need to sign up for a membership or some
| other thing to manufacture chips that comply with the
| standard.
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