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I've felt strongly for a few years that there is a market (strong interest, if not financial) for a small computer designed to let you be creative and expressiv
by incanus77 5y ago
I've felt strongly for a few years that there is a market (strong interest, if not financial) for a small computer designed to let you be creative and expressive and to learn how computers really work. Over the past year and a half, I've built up a BASIC-like system on my own bare metal kernel on ARM64, giving a boot-to-BASIC programming and prototyping environment in a few seconds. I've worked down the stack as far as building an SBC-based custom hardware with HDMI and keyboard that also works as a handheld portable with onboard display & speaker. You can also do inline ARM64 assembly and memory peeking/disassembly as well as instruction-level step debugging. Polyphonic audio, direct I2C/SPI/GPIO/etc. access (i.e. at the byte level), and more.
It's just radically freeing to not have to wait for a boot, to have direct control over hardware resources like the frame buffer and audio registers, but to start with something as simple as Hello World and go in either direction from there — up in programming complexity or down in systems understanding. I'm very close to getting it into friends' (and their kids') hands. I'd love for it to take off, and have experience actually selling services and products, so I don't think it'll just be a hacker toy, but who knows? Regardless, it's been probably the single best learning project I've ever done. And it's so fun! It'll continue to be so for me whether it sells and/or has a community that builds up around it, or if it's just my passion.
- striking 5y agoDo you have a newsletter or website? Would love to hear about updates to this.
- incanus77 5y agoNot yet, but I'll be certain to post it here when it's in a form where I feel comfortable doing that.
- AussieWog93 5y agoI have had this exact idea before, and agree with you on almost every front except for this seeing widespread adoption by non-hackers. :P "Radically freeing" is exactly how I'd imagine it too. If you need any help at all on the non-technical aspects (logistics, fundraising, manufacturing/stock-keeping), please shoot us a message (email in bio). Not asking for anything in return, would just love to see something like this come to market. So many creators overlook these aspects, and they're arguably more important than the technical specifics.
- incanus77 5y agoThanks, I appreciate this. I have thought of many of these factors, and am well familiar with many of the ways that non-technical aspects of technical projects can surprise/horrify/block/crush you.
- AussieWog93 5y agoBrilliant. In that case, please share your project here when it's ready to go! I'm sure it would reach the front page very quickly, and I'd love to buy one if only to support you!
- jareklupinski 5y agoGive it a small LCD screen, cool keyboard layout, call it a "cyberdeck", and I'm in for one :)
- incanus77 5y agoThe current approach has a 2" LCD and exposes the normal Pi GPIO on the top in a way that would allow something like the CardKB[1] (or anything similar) in a HAT format. [1] https://shop.m5stack.com/products/cardkb-mini-keyboard https://shop.m5stack.com/products/cardkb-mini-keyboard