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Interesting! I (obviously?) hold Bunnie's work in very high regard, but I had not seen Xous before. It seems to be similar in some respects to Hubris[0], but i

Interesting! I (obviously?) hold Bunnie's work in very high regard, but I had not seen Xous before. It seems to be similar in some respects to Hubris[0], but it's hard to discern its design center as most of the documentation appears to be forthcoming? Regardless, it's great to see more work in this important domain! [0] http://cliffle.com/blog/on-hubris-and-humility/ http://cliffle.com/blog/on-hubris-and-humility/

panick21_ 5y ago
Xous seems to be one step up from Hubris in terms of being oriented towards interactive applications and running full UI and dynamically loading applications. I have not enough knowledge about the underlying message passing semantics to give an educated differentiation. Maybe the most interesting feature is the Plausibly Deniable DataBase (PDDB). See: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6307 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6307 Here is some of the design intent behind Xous explained by its main designer: https://youtu.be/_pIr3Q7gqNI?t=959 https://youtu.be/_pIr3Q7gqNI?t=959 He described Tock as to small and Redox as to big in one of the talks.
mwcampbell 5y ago
bunnie made a 1-hour video that walks through the Precursor tech stack (no, not ideal from an accessibility perspective): https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6336 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6336 IIUC, Xous is designed for environments that aren't quite as constrained as the microcontrollers that Hubris runs on. Precursor has 16 MB of RAM and 128 MB of SPI flash. There's some kind of support for separate executables, but the OS and applications are packaged in one image. Whatever flash isn't used by that image is for user storage. Also, they've got the Rust std library, or at least some subset of it, running on Xous. Incidentally, bunnie is working with me on a version of Precursor with a braille keyboard and text-to-speech output. I got my prototype unit today. So I'll be digging into Xous more soon. bunnie wrote a nice article about the process of designing the braille keyboard here: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor/updates/whats-the-value-of-hackable-hardware-anyway https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor/updates... and covered more recent developments on that front, including meaty technical details on the software side, in a recent status update: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor/updates/more-supply-chain-issues-surprise-edition-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor/updates... I still need to figure out the use cases that Precursor is best suited for, given the modest hardware specs, but it's still cool to have a fully open mobile hardware platform that's fully accessible.

panick21_ 5y ago

Xous seems to be one step up from Hubris in terms of being oriented towards interactive applications and running full UI and dynamically loading applications. I have not enough knowledge about the underlying message passing semantics to give an educated differentiation. Maybe the most interesting feature is the Plausibly Deniable DataBase (PDDB). See: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6307 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6307 Here is some of the design intent behind Xous explained by its main designer: https://youtu.be/_pIr3Q7gqNI?t=959 https://youtu.be/_pIr3Q7gqNI?t=959 He described Tock as to small and Redox as to big in one of the talks.

mwcampbell 5y ago

bunnie made a 1-hour video that walks through the Precursor tech stack (no, not ideal from an accessibility perspective): https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6336 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6336 IIUC, Xous is designed for environments that aren't quite as constrained as the microcontrollers that Hubris runs on. Precursor has 16 MB of RAM and 128 MB of SPI flash. There's some kind of support for separate executables, but the OS and applications are packaged in one image. Whatever flash isn't used by that image is for user storage. Also, they've got the Rust std library, or at least some subset of it, running on Xous. Incidentally, bunnie is working with me on a version of Precursor with a braille keyboard and text-to-speech output. I got my prototype unit today. So I'll be digging into Xous more soon. bunnie wrote a nice article about the process of designing the braille keyboard here: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor/updates/whats-the-value-of-hackable-hardware-anyway https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor/updates... and covered more recent developments on that front, including meaty technical details on the software side, in a recent status update: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor/updates/more-supply-chain-issues-surprise-edition-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor/updates... I still need to figure out the use cases that Precursor is best suited for, given the modest hardware specs, but it's still cool to have a fully open mobile hardware platform that's fully accessible.