5 ms·

I love these kinds of things. The ubiquitous rise of USB3/USB-C has lead to the complete death of portable tech tools like this. "Thing goes inside my computer"

I love these kinds of things. The ubiquitous rise of USB3/USB-C has lead to the complete death of portable tech tools like this. "Thing goes inside my computer" cant happen when theres only cable ports. Imagine this with modern computing power and an e-Ink touchscreen, perfect for being a basic information manager, provided you can sync with the necessary software/clouds (a task that hasn't gotten easier unfortunately).

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eternityforest 4y ago
Could be easily solved with an expansion port that's just a recessed USB male in a card slot with well defined dimensions and tight enough tolerance to ensure the USB always goes in.
- techdragon 4y ago
  Yes, but two problems… Firstly, without a standard, your just engineering your own solutions and no one else can serendipitously solve your problems for you in the form of a product you can just buy, like the one in the posted article. Secondly, USB is a much more complicated protocol than the PCI and ISA of days past. Not only that, but the standards are a patchwork of publicly available parts of an otherwise unavailable proprietary whole that the USB standards organisation gatekeeps access too. Yes enough of it is public you can make your own things, but no it’s not the same as things like the ISA bus which is completely documented. You can’t just whip up a cool gadget with logic and some memory then expose it to a computer and then the computer reads it… now you have a bunch of embedded device work to do so your gadget can initialise its side of the communication protocol and respond to whatever software you write sending it interrogation messages over whatever protocol you end up using. So much more complex. I did a bunch of research recently on computer interface busses while looking for a “slot bus” to build something out of embedded hardware modules that were individually responsible for their on-board logic but needed a common backplane for power and inter module communication… seems simple right, well no… it turns out the last fully open well documented “passive backplane” bus was ISA bus. So I’ve had to begin pondering how to build my own solution, which will probably just be some kind of SPI which leads me to my current lament of standards other than USB, when everything is a USB device, if your use case is for something other than USB then your just out of luck.
  - pomatic 4y ago
    I2C perhaps? Fewer wires than SPI.
    - techdragon 4y ago
      My problem was less a pin count issue and more a reliability/hardware complexity issue. I was trying to have a fully passive backplane, resistors, diodes and maybe some capacitors if needed, very simple, very electrically reliable, and then I wanted to put my individual modules onto the backplane bus in such a way that it didn’t really matter if one of them died, they weren’t supposed to be reliant on any sort of bus master or shared backplane provided clock signal, or anything like that, I was picturing something like an old school Ethernet hub network using parallel signals, each board can handle collision detection and listening for its “address” without any dependence on any of the other hardware boards. Seems so simple I figured something like it had to exist, but either it doesn’t, or Google and DuckDuckGo failed me hundreds of times over a couple of weeks searching for information about backplanes, backplane standards, device busses and bus signalling.
  - eternityforest 4y ago
    That's what I was thinking, some kind of USB-D card standard that specified exactly where the port goes. It would be extra cool because it could also serve as a battery format, just make a power bank in that size. USB 2.0 and 1.1 are trivial solved problems in practice. They're built into so many chips now, and it's far easier to work with in terms of PCB design. Stuff like the ESP32-S2 or even the soft implementations in 8 bit micros are really good and just work, plus you have the possibility of fully driverless stuff pretending to be storage, keyboards, midi, ethernet, etc, and it's all just as easy as any other Arduino lib, no protocol understanding needed. It's true that you can't do dumb passive stuff with it(Although if you really wanted to you could use a dedicated USB to SPI/I2C/GPIO whatever chip and have the PC emulate whatever you want), but that doesn't really hold back products, things are just done differently. It sucks for anyone trying to make gadgets that aren't just a microcontroller plus code, but there's so many possibilities with the new style that it's worth learning. For hobby tinkering type stuff and exploring stuff outside "A PC that talks to a MCU", yeah, it's not really a supported use case.
- jjkaczor 4y ago
  Could possibly replicate this with the framework notebook and it's expansion card standard: https://frame.work/ca/en/marketplace/expansion-cards https://frame.work/ca/en/marketplace/expansion-cards

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[deleted]

eternityforest 4y ago

Could be easily solved with an expansion port that's just a recessed USB male in a card slot with well defined dimensions and tight enough tolerance to ensure the USB always goes in.

techdragon 4y ago
Yes, but two problems… Firstly, without a standard, your just engineering your own solutions and no one else can serendipitously solve your problems for you in the form of a product you can just buy, like the one in the posted article. Secondly, USB is a much more complicated protocol than the PCI and ISA of days past. Not only that, but the standards are a patchwork of publicly available parts of an otherwise unavailable proprietary whole that the USB standards organisation gatekeeps access too. Yes enough of it is public you can make your own things, but no it’s not the same as things like the ISA bus which is completely documented. You can’t just whip up a cool gadget with logic and some memory then expose it to a computer and then the computer reads it… now you have a bunch of embedded device work to do so your gadget can initialise its side of the communication protocol and respond to whatever software you write sending it interrogation messages over whatever protocol you end up using. So much more complex. I did a bunch of research recently on computer interface busses while looking for a “slot bus” to build something out of embedded hardware modules that were individually responsible for their on-board logic but needed a common backplane for power and inter module communication… seems simple right, well no… it turns out the last fully open well documented “passive backplane” bus was ISA bus. So I’ve had to begin pondering how to build my own solution, which will probably just be some kind of SPI which leads me to my current lament of standards other than USB, when everything is a USB device, if your use case is for something other than USB then your just out of luck.
- pomatic 4y ago
  I2C perhaps? Fewer wires than SPI.
  - techdragon 4y ago
    My problem was less a pin count issue and more a reliability/hardware complexity issue. I was trying to have a fully passive backplane, resistors, diodes and maybe some capacitors if needed, very simple, very electrically reliable, and then I wanted to put my individual modules onto the backplane bus in such a way that it didn’t really matter if one of them died, they weren’t supposed to be reliant on any sort of bus master or shared backplane provided clock signal, or anything like that, I was picturing something like an old school Ethernet hub network using parallel signals, each board can handle collision detection and listening for its “address” without any dependence on any of the other hardware boards. Seems so simple I figured something like it had to exist, but either it doesn’t, or Google and DuckDuckGo failed me hundreds of times over a couple of weeks searching for information about backplanes, backplane standards, device busses and bus signalling.
- eternityforest 4y ago
  That's what I was thinking, some kind of USB-D card standard that specified exactly where the port goes. It would be extra cool because it could also serve as a battery format, just make a power bank in that size. USB 2.0 and 1.1 are trivial solved problems in practice. They're built into so many chips now, and it's far easier to work with in terms of PCB design. Stuff like the ESP32-S2 or even the soft implementations in 8 bit micros are really good and just work, plus you have the possibility of fully driverless stuff pretending to be storage, keyboards, midi, ethernet, etc, and it's all just as easy as any other Arduino lib, no protocol understanding needed. It's true that you can't do dumb passive stuff with it(Although if you really wanted to you could use a dedicated USB to SPI/I2C/GPIO whatever chip and have the PC emulate whatever you want), but that doesn't really hold back products, things are just done differently. It sucks for anyone trying to make gadgets that aren't just a microcontroller plus code, but there's so many possibilities with the new style that it's worth learning. For hobby tinkering type stuff and exploring stuff outside "A PC that talks to a MCU", yeah, it's not really a supported use case.
jjkaczor 4y ago
Could possibly replicate this with the framework notebook and it's expansion card standard: https://frame.work/ca/en/marketplace/expansion-cards https://frame.work/ca/en/marketplace/expansion-cards