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I have this bucket list idea of getting the lowest-powered chip I can find that's still fast enough to give me a nice little *nix environment in which I can use

by Ezhik 7y ago

I have this bucket list idea of getting the lowest-powered chip I can find that's still fast enough to give me a nice little *nix environment in which I can use Vim, Tmux, and also SSH into things, then sticking it into a laptop shell and filling the rest of the space with batteries. I wonder if one could achieve like a month of battery life for such a glorified typewriter/thin client.

amelius 7y ago
I guess it also needs an e-ink screen, otherwise the screen would still draw a lot of the power.
- IgorPartola 7y ago
  How fast are eInk displays nowadays? Like what kind of refresh rate are we looking at?
  - mftrhu 7y ago
    Not much more than a few Hertz, AFAICT. It should be enough to use a terminal - someone even installed X and ran XFCE on a Kindle, but it looks pretty weird.
    - dkudriavtsev 7y ago
      They actually run X by default. They use the Awesome window manager.
quickthrower2 7y ago
I've been messing around with an Arduino this week to make my own IoT device. It has enough power to negotiate a https connection, so presumably it could run SSH and Vim. I think they are very efficient in terms of power usage.
jodrellblank 7y ago
Stack batteries on the back of a jailbroken Kindle 3G running Debian? Not sure how far you'll get with power management on it. Or using it.
IgorPartola 7y ago
Just curious, what would you use vim for on a device like that? Presumably it won’t be able to do much beyond what you outlined so unless you plan on using it as just a not taking device/typewriter, why not just have an embedded ssh client with tmux?
- Ezhik 7y ago
  Pretty much just what you said - when offline, it's just a fancy typewriter that I can also run a simple shell script or two on.
joezydeco 7y ago
On a recent project I played around with some SoCs that could do something like this. I wound up using a Renesas RZ/A1L, it's an ARM-A9 core with 3MB of SRAM on the die. You attach it to an inexpensive quad-lane SPI NOR flash part and it will boot Linux with just those two parts. The flash serves as a filesystem and I believe you can also XIP the kernel off the NOR part if you choose. We even ran Qt on it with an XGA LCD and it was poky but it worked. It could probably do what you're looking to do. https://www.renesas.com/us/en/doc/products/mpumcu/doc/rz/r01cp0031ej0400-rz.pdf https://www.renesas.com/us/en/doc/products/mpumcu/doc/rz/r01... That's probably the lowest-end part I'd say would work for something like this. You can run Linux off a cheaper Cortex-M with some amount of work, but it's not pleasant. The iMXRT1050 does look interesting, though. https://www.emcraft.com/imxrt1050-evk-board https://www.emcraft.com/imxrt1050-evk-board
tyingq 7y ago
There's the Vocore2. Five volts, 74ma draw when idle. https://vocore.io/v2.html https://vocore.io/v2.html No video though.

by Ezhik 7y ago

amelius 7y ago

I guess it also needs an e-ink screen, otherwise the screen would still draw a lot of the power.

IgorPartola 7y ago
How fast are eInk displays nowadays? Like what kind of refresh rate are we looking at?
- mftrhu 7y ago
  Not much more than a few Hertz, AFAICT. It should be enough to use a terminal - someone even installed X and ran XFCE on a Kindle, but it looks pretty weird.
  - dkudriavtsev 7y ago
    They actually run X by default. They use the Awesome window manager.

quickthrower2 7y ago

I've been messing around with an Arduino this week to make my own IoT device. It has enough power to negotiate a https connection, so presumably it could run SSH and Vim. I think they are very efficient in terms of power usage.

jodrellblank 7y ago

Stack batteries on the back of a jailbroken Kindle 3G running Debian? Not sure how far you'll get with power management on it. Or using it.

IgorPartola 7y ago

Just curious, what would you use vim for on a device like that? Presumably it won’t be able to do much beyond what you outlined so unless you plan on using it as just a not taking device/typewriter, why not just have an embedded ssh client with tmux?

Ezhik 7y ago
Pretty much just what you said - when offline, it's just a fancy typewriter that I can also run a simple shell script or two on.

joezydeco 7y ago

On a recent project I played around with some SoCs that could do something like this. I wound up using a Renesas RZ/A1L, it's an ARM-A9 core with 3MB of SRAM on the die. You attach it to an inexpensive quad-lane SPI NOR flash part and it will boot Linux with just those two parts. The flash serves as a filesystem and I believe you can also XIP the kernel off the NOR part if you choose. We even ran Qt on it with an XGA LCD and it was poky but it worked. It could probably do what you're looking to do. https://www.renesas.com/us/en/doc/products/mpumcu/doc/rz/r01cp0031ej0400-rz.pdf https://www.renesas.com/us/en/doc/products/mpumcu/doc/rz/r01... That's probably the lowest-end part I'd say would work for something like this. You can run Linux off a cheaper Cortex-M with some amount of work, but it's not pleasant. The iMXRT1050 does look interesting, though. https://www.emcraft.com/imxrt1050-evk-board https://www.emcraft.com/imxrt1050-evk-board

tyingq 7y ago

There's the Vocore2. Five volts, 74ma draw when idle. https://vocore.io/v2.html https://vocore.io/v2.html No video though.