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Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life
- xattt 1y ago> solar power Tangential, but what happened to Intel Claremont, the solar-powered CPU? Did this project go anywhere or was it only a tech demo?
- kstrauser 1y agoTake my money. No, really, this is precisely the sort of thing I've wanted for ages, and I don't have the time or resources to build it myself.
- bombcar 1y agoThis is basically the HP 200LX on steroids.
- tomcam 1y agoI so desperately wanted one of those. Later I became pretty successful and spent about 15 years paying massive, tax-deductible sums for tiny ahead-of-their times laptops from Sony, Panasonic, etc. until the first MacBook Air came out and finally delivered on the promise of small laptops with decent performance.
- keyle 1y agoI don't know if you've seen the videos, but the latency from input to result on the screen is, very, very bad. I don't think this is actually what you want. We all want low-power retro computing but expect reasonable latency in usage. We also want WIFI working in every room and e-ink that doesn't suck and doesn't cost half a car... And the ability to browse the web (HTTPS). It's just not there yet. When someone will make a product this good with all of the modern life "requirements", that will be a vastly successful product I imagine.
- kstrauser 1y agoRats. Those are good points and you're right. I do so want that, though.
- DoingIsLearning 1y agoI think it would be 90% of the way there if you swapped the e-ink for a transflective panel with some form of RLCD.
- keyle 1y agoYeah a MacBook Air type device with such a screen would be interesting.
- stephen_cagle 1y agoOut of curiosity how quickly could you log into wifi, check for whatever on the wifi, and turn off? Can you do that every 200 ms and have the wifi off most of the time? Is that what cell phones do already? Mostly just curious about minimizing energy usage due to wifi.
- morsch 1y agoYou stay associated, but other than that: yes. Logging entirely out and back in every 200 ms would be bad, because associating is expensive and it probably takes longer than 200 ms, at least if you also want to do anything useful. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11e-2005#APSD https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11e-2005#APSD
- fc417fc802 1y agoAgreed that latency and lack of WiFi would be problematic. I have no need of HTTPS though. I'm happy to live in a terminal and ssh to a "real" computer for anything that goes beyond vim.
- hypercube33 1y agoSomeone else mentioned a Transreflective screen. we used to get a whole week with a Motorola Dragonball 6800 CPU and one of those screens on two AA batteries.... I want palm pilot back personally. Best mobile games still to this day. That said a responsive x86 pocket top that also has a 5 day battery would be awesome too. Solar can change pretty quickly.
- tomrod 1y agoPretty dang cool. Well done. My ideal setup before eyeing the e-ink space was a linux-based netbook and occasional internet access to offload heavy compute to powerful servers. I could see using this sort of setup in a similar fashion.
- knowitnone 1y agoChromebook with linux installed?
- tomrod 1y agoA bit clunkier compared to a clean ARM or AMD linux install, but still more or less useful. Asus' eeePc was awesome!
- kstrauser 1y agoI had an Eee PC 701. Pluses: the size was perfect. Minuses: everything else, from the CPU to the tiny drive to the tiny RAM to the keyboard to the trackpad was meh, at best. I'd love one with modern tech, long battery life, decent display quality, and long battery life. I don't care if it could only do text mode. That might even be ideal for my uses, which would primarily involve running Emacs and org-mode.
- ctoth 1y agoCheck out GPD. I am typing this from a GPD Win Max and it's a lovely little x64 machine with 64 GB of RAM and a 7840U CPU (8 cores at 3.3 GHz) and ... it fits in a coat pocket. The battery life is okayish (~5 hours after 2 years?), but USB C charging means just buy extra battery packs.
- kstrauser 1y agoThat's super cool! Thanks for the idea.
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- reaperducer 1y agoReminds me of playing SimCity and learning Turbo C on my IBM PC Convertible with its far inferior non-backlit monochrome display. Interesting that they Sharpied-out all of the extraneous keys, except Windows.
- sedatk 1y agoNot an XT clone per se. XT had 8088 CPU, CGA/Hercules display adapter, and a 640KB RAM with a PC speaker. This one has 80186 and 1MB RAM with MCGA (VGA) and Adlib emulation too. It's better than an XT.
- pinewurst 1y agoThis one has ESP32 just running 80186 emulator.
- sedatk 1y agoStill, it's not emulating an XT. XT is a very specific PC configuration. Maybe they just wanted to emphasize that it was ancient.
- bobmcnamara 1y agoFully upgraded, my XT had VGA, 1MB including extended memory shenanigans, a sound card, a SCSI card, and Ethernet.
- ForOldHack 1y agoI threw in a VGA, and dual 20Mb hard disks. 10Mhz, v20 and 8087 FPU. Dual 6550 serial card, great for modem, over kill for a mouse. A $9 sound card that was AdLib compatible on one chip.
- ssl-3 1y agoYe olde XT I had topped out with 640KB of RAM, a 20 megabyte and 15 megabyte MFM drives (ST-225, ST-419), two power supplies (the big full-height 15-meg drive needed extra time to spin up), one 16550 serial port card, no mouse, a SoundBlaster 1.5, a clock card, and a 2 megabyte EMS expansion card (with 72 individual DIP chips on it)....with a 10MHz 8088. Weird times. Eventually, someone donated a board with an AMD 386SX-33, which I immediately overclocked to 40MHz. Things became a lot different after that.
- saulpw 1y agoMan, I want this, but IBM AT level, 32-bits with at least a 386 and 8MB of RAM.
- bombcar 1y agoThere were a bunch of those appearing on the various Chinese sites recently. https://www.tindie.com/products/cycle/pocket386-retro-dos-computer-386sx-40mhz-clear/ https://www.tindie.com/products/cycle/pocket386-retro-dos-co...
- userbinator 1y agoLooks like someone found a good way to get rid of a bunch of new-old-stock embedded/industrial boards and/or SoCs that were sitting around in a warehouse somewhere in China. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40750371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40750371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35995959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35995959
- lanna 1y agoThe IBM AT used an Intel 80286
- ForOldHack 1y agoThe Original IBM AT used a 6Mhz 286, and then an 8Mhz 286, and then modified the ROMSs so you could not make a 6Mhz into an 8Mhz by swapping the crystal. Other vendors cranked up the speed to 10, 12, 16, 20 and finally 25Mhz. IBM PS2s went for 10Mhz 1 Wait state, and 10Mhz zero wait states. A 25Mhz 286 rivaled a 386 DX in speed in benchmarks, but was left in the just for any 32-bit apps. I had a 20Mhz 286 with 4mb of ram, but only for DOS programs such as CA-General Ledger.
- bitwize 1y agoThe AT was still the model for clones until the PCI bus came out. It's even in the names of devices and peripherals: ATX motherboard form factor, ATA (IDE) drive interface, etc.
- hyperhello 1y agoCan you make one that emulates a PowerBook 100?
- unleaded 1y agocan you? There's a MAME driver in macprtb.cpp you could work off—might want a few hacks in your implementation which is nothing new to Mac emulation. also this: https://github.com/evansm7/pico-mac https://github.com/evansm7/pico-mac
- hedgehog 1y agoI really like this design by John Calhoun (known to me originally for his game Glider, I think he posts on HN as well): https://www.engineersneedart.com/systemsix/systemsix.html https://www.engineersneedart.com/systemsix/systemsix.html A wire-free version running a Mac emulator would be pretty slick. Very usable with MacWrite or a HyperCard deck of recipes.
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoCame here to say something similar. A laptop with a high quality transflective screen (e-ink is a touch too slow) that can run classic Mac OS with absurdly long battery life would be a nice little device.
- RodgerTheGreat 1y agoMini vMac runs wonderfully on an OLPC XO-1 if you build it from source.
- jmward01 1y agoI think there is a class of device here that is missing. Low power but forever devices that have some basic functionality. Over time I could see this taking over laptops and the like as ultra-low-power became more and more capable.
- chii 1y ago> Low power but forever devices that have some basic functionality. like paper? :D
- chneu 1y agoLow power consumption. slap a small set of solar panels on there like Garmin watches, and possibly add a wireless power generator. I could see a device like that having standby battery measured in years.
- ct0 1y agoThere are a few commercial products popping up and marketing. I think youll find what you find here interesting: https://old.reddit.com/r/writerDeck/ https://old.reddit.com/r/writerDeck/ Im using a Boox palma 2 on a stand, and a Thinkpad Keyboard 2 to emulate the same thing. The battery life may not be 100 hours but considerable.
- jmward01 1y agoI'd love something ipad size with an attached keyboard/trackpad that did the very basics of compute but on a more modern stack. I think the biggest thing that would hold me back would likely be the slow refresh rate/no color in the display. I bet a setup like that with solar so is trickle charged could be built and have an effectively unlimited runtime. I wonder when high refresh rate/color e-ink like displays will finally make it?
- nine_k 1y agoMost people sell or give away fully functional, very powerful mobile phones, because of the end of the software support. Hardware is more than capable for a long time, and is often very durable. But it takes a special kind of audience to put up with decade-old unsupported software, let alone with IBM XT-level software (which I remember using). Security is not a consideration for such devices, because of their very limited number. Nobody is going to crack into your internet-connected Amiga except maybe some of your friends, as a prank. But a forever-device used for something substantial, something touching money in any way, would have to be much more up-to-date.
- rasz 1y ago>100+ hours of battery life you will spend 99 of those hours waiting for screen refresh (1/second).
- actionfromafar 1y agoIt would be really neat if the emulator had some kind of "escape mode" where it could jump to and run the native instruction set. It could even be implemented to look like some kind of extension card in RAM. You write native instructions to a piece of RAM and call a special (otherwise invalid) 8086 instruction and the native execution kicks in. Or if you want to make it more ambitious, create a COM or EXE format which indicates that the instructions are really ESP32 native, but with full access to the BIOS functions with some kind of translation layer.
- kovac 1y agoLove it! Any idea how long the display can last? I've been playing around with e-paper (nothing as impressive as this!) dashboards. I use Waveshare displays that has a max of 1 million refresh cycles. The display you've used seems more capable. My own humble e-paper projects: https://www.asciimx.com/projects/e-reader/ https://www.asciimx.com/projects/e-reader/ https://www.asciimx.com/projects/etlas/ https://www.asciimx.com/projects/etlas/
- codebje 1y agoIt's probably https://www.good-display.com/product/440.html https://www.good-display.com/product/440.html which is also 1mil refresh cycles and a fast refresh time of 1.5sec - around 185 hours of screen updates, so ~3 months of 5hrs a day typing or a few years of e-reader style usage. I can't really see a device like this getting used super heavily every day, so expecting it to still be usable from time to time for a few years seems reasonable to me.
- kstrauser 1y agoFor e-ink, does the refresh count include the entire screen or individual pixels?
- redundantly 1y agoFrom what I can tell, a partial refresh of the display (updating a smaller portion of the screen) performs less wear on the display than a full refresh, but it can still accumulate over time. Additionally some displays will require a full refresh after a certain number of partial refreshes to deal with ghosting.
- kstrauser 1y agoHuh, interesting. I don't know anything about it, but my Kobo Libra has settings for how often to refresh the whole screen (e.g. every N pages, at the end of the chapter, etc.).
- fortran77 1y agoThe HP Palmtop IBM PC compatible clones also had very long battery life--on double AA batteries: https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-golden-age-of-hp-palmtop-pcs https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-golden-age-of-hp-palmtop-pcs
- squigz 1y agoFairly unrelated, but loading that repo's page is nearly 200MB... Was a bit surprised at that.
- hulitu 1y ago> Fairly unrelated, but loading that repo's page is nearly 200MB... Was a bit surprised at that. We have more than 8 GB of RAM, TB of hard drive and GHz computing power. We are humans. We just don't care. If we can waste something, we waste it. /s
- squigz 1y agoWell to be fair, bandwidth is one area that's still limited a lot of the time.
- coolcoder613 1y agoThat's because there is a lot of videos on that page.
- fnord77 1y agowhat's the rationale for x86? To run vintage software? I would love an eink laptop like this but with ARM, modern ports and linux
- 6SixTy 1y agoThen search for Raspberry Pi laptop cases and go for the one that can hold your choice of eink display + driver?
- int_19h 1y agoIt does seem a bit strange given the overall focus on power consumption and battery life. Surely emulation is a very heavy tax on the hardware? Imagine what it could do with software running natively.
- 6SixTy 1y agoWell, the creator chose to use a regular ESP32, which is Xtensa based, and is poorly suited for this type of application. It's really weird anyways because the ESP32 fairly old nor as useful as something like the C6 which on paper could run Linux but without floating point.
- fsiefken 1y agoI think because the PCEmulator on the low power esm32 chip supports DOS and ELKS is just as limited and there is much less software for it. As an alternative to DOS in the PCemulator that's running you could use FreeDOS or a port of Linux. https://github.com/ESP32DE/Boot-Linux-ESP32S3-Playground https://github.com/ESP32DE/Boot-Linux-ESP32S3-Playground https://youtu.be/pj0a91vlcGo https://youtu.be/pj0a91vlcGo While DOS is limited, you could port your most used tools or software to DOS or port them, there's a vim and emacs port, you can play interactive fiction, read e-books, program in Turbo Pascal 5.5/7.0, Turbo C / Borland C++ (1.x - 3.1), use hypertext, sqlite, markdown, perhaps use long filenames with FreeDOS or Calmira for windows 3.0?
- Gormo 1y ago> what's the rationale for x86? To run vintage software? Sounds reasonable. In an off-grid situation, best to stick with software written before the mid-2000s.
- bee_rider 1y agoInteresting hardware. The IBM emulation stuff—it is a project, the some 40 year old OS seems quite limiting, but I can see why one might do that for fun. But, the hardware looks like… maybe something folks might actually buy? Maybe only us, here, though, haha.
- d3Xt3r 1y agoThis is awesome, only wish it was a 486DX2 with 4/8MB RAM instead, that would increase the possibilities of running more heavier operating systems, like Windows 95. Also, is there a mention of the refresh rate of the display? I wonder what gaming on it would be like. They provided a screenshot of Test Drive and Wolf3D running on it, but a video would've been nicer.
- mulmen 1y ago> Also, is there a mention of the refresh rate of the display? I wonder what gaming on it would be like. They provided a screenshot of Test Drive and Wolf3D running on it, but a video would've been nicer. There's a 2:30 video of Wolfenstein 3D gameplay on the linked README page.
- billyjmc 1y agoThere’s a video, too, but the framerate wasn’t usefully playable. I’ve seen worse, but you wouldn’t ever want to play it this way.
- girvo 1y agoSo it's not quite that, but the Pocket 386 exists right now today, and is quite excellent! https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/a-few-weeks-with-the-pocket-386-an-early-90s-style-half-busted-retro-pc/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/a-few-weeks-with-the... You can buy them off Aliexpress etc. quite easily
- userbinator 1y agoThis is running under emulation, but I wonder if the power savings would be even more (an order of magnitude?) if the hardware was "gate accurate" to the original but shrunken down to a modern CMOS process. I find it amusing that the keyboard has a Windows key. Does anyone recognise what laptop it was originally from? It can't be a Thinkpad since there's no pointing stick, and I seem to remember some early Dells having a similar odd layout, but it's definitely an older one given the keys aren't islands. Odd placement of home/end and that right shift key aside, that actually looks better than most if not all laptop keyboards today (ins/del/home/end aren't Fn'd, and there's full-size arrow keys!)
- 31337Logic 1y agoIt's called a TrackPoint. ;-)
- genewitch 1y agoIntel makes the quark which is like a 486dx that runs on a watch battery. There are a few models now, but I think that qualifies?
- pmcjones 1y agoThe Quark was discontinued in 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quark
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- genewitch 1y agostill existed, i have 2 of them. they're on ebay for <20USD
- hypercube33 1y agoThere is a spin off of Via that makes 386 or 486 clones still today...forget the name but you can find them out there.
- RecycledEle 1y agoThis is what portable computers should have been.
- karunamurti 1y agoCTRL+F DOOM. I'm not disappointed.
- sien 1y agoThe idea of a laptop with an e-ink display running Linux and having days of battery life is really interesting. To save others doing what I did there is an Android tablet like this called 'Daylight' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43098318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43098318
- sien 1y agoOh, the Clockwork Pi is also interesting. https://www.clockworkpi.com/ https://www.clockworkpi.com/
- mamcx 1y agoThe irony of a retro computer with a web page that is unusable(can't click, scroll weird, ...) because too modern webdev :)
- fractallyte 1y agoThere's also the MobiScribe Wave (https://mobiscribe.com/ https://mobiscribe.com/), a color e-ink Android tablet, with frontlighting, and excellent battery life. On standby, it lasts for weeks. I have it hooked up to my Bluetooth keyboard. It runs emacs, a web browser, and email client - plus all the usual e-reader apps. (Yes, I'm aware there are several other Android e-readers. The Wave has the unique combination of top-end handwriting functionality with waterproofing.)
- aftergibson 1y agoI think the closest thing I've gotten to the Linux + E-Ink dream(for me at least) is the Pinenote with a bluetooth keyboard. It's been a surprisingly enjoyable portable device(nice wireless keyboard doesn't hurt either) and it's powerful enough to do some nice simple stuff, then disconnect they keyboard and it's back to being an book/newsfeed reader.
- shdon 1y agoSurely that's Doom8088 rather than the original version if this thing truly emulates an XT level machine (or rather an 80186 CPU)?
- Narishma 1y agoHow does it even work on an 80186? I thought Doom required a 386.
- hakfoo 1y agoThere's been some downports. They tend to be slow, some of them using things like rendering using 80x50 text modes in 16 colours to reduce the "pixel" count. I recall trying a Wolfenstein 3-D downport and it was getting about 5 fps on a NEC V40 (80188-equivalent) at 8MHz.
- fuzunoglu 1y agoPowered by ESP32, which reportedly uses archaic 40nm technology. Aren't there some good ARM microprocessors built with 5nm technology, which would consume comparable power?
- bobmcnamara 1y agoNot with a radio, no
- cestith 1y agoThe brand new rp2350 from Raspberry Pi is also made on 40nm. Microcontrollers are often on 40nm or 32nm processes, but those processes didn’t stop being updated twenty years ago.
- NullPointerWin 1y agoI love it!Well done.
- andai 1y agoSuper cool. I wonder how this would work with one of those transflective LCDs, like the Sharp Memory thing they used in the Playdate. There's a bit more latency than I'd like with the typing. Though maybe that could be fixed on eink with partial updates? For me the main benefit of a device like this would be reading and writing without distractions, so having it run DOOM smoothly would not help me! But I do really want low latency typing...
- ginkgotree 1y agoThis actually has some super cool field digital note taking applications, where one may be away from power for a long time and just needs a digital means of writing TXT files. Awesome work!!
- ggm 1y ago3 decades ago I did upgrade logistics for NMR labs using HP and Nixdorf based backends to run the machines. What amazed me was how the HP gui was X10. pre X10R4. They decided "good enough" and commercialised a species of interface with a trackball and keyboard, which at least in terms of GUI styling was 1:1 congruent with X10R1 as I saw it in 85 or so. I continue to notice this interface on Ultrasound and like, I guess having coded the FPGAs to work, they just stopped changing it. It wouldn't surprise me if XT was similar. I remember doing a pre-purchase review of DirecTV and the sat management was OS/2, long long after it was deprecated. Same behaviour in aerospace: keep the tech which works. This is why German armed forces were recently commissioning USB compatible SD type storage with insanely huge plugs, and slow interfaces, to replace 8" and 5.25" media for field upgrades of some devices.
- fsmv 1y agoThis can run my text editor and lisp interpreter I wrote in assembly. I really should get one of these.
- ryao 1y agoIt sounds like it would be an awesome portable terminal emulator. Are there any good terminal emulator applications for DOS? How is the Minix 2.0 experience if you go that route?
- EvanAnderson 1y agoProcomm or Telix would likely run just fine in the DOS side. I don't know if Minicomm will build under Minix but I would certainly investigate it.
- TMWNN 1y agoMS Kermit
- NoGravitas 1y agoTelix was good, as was CKermit for DOS. Neither supports modern perversions like 256 colors, but they both support VT220 or color ANSI.
- bitwize 1y agoJust what George R.R. Martin could use if his actual XT ever went kaputski.
- pjmlp 1y agoWhile I love the work, it is more like an adaptation, I am quite certain there were no PS/2 keyboards back in XT days, rather the classical din pin one. PS/2 keyboards are early 1990's.
- roywashere 1y agoI'm not even sure why you would point this out. I'm also quite certain there were also no USB flash drives, SD card support, Wifi networking and e-ink displays in the early 1990s. It's not a replica in any way, it does not claim to be that. Just a cool compute device!
- pjmlp 1y agoWhat does clone mean?
- ssl-3 1y agoIt means the author is fond of just making shit up. "I built an XT 'clone' [that doesn't even target the same CPU as an XT]"
- roywashere 1y agoClone meant, at least back in the day, that it was compatible with software written for the IBM XT. There were many clones with more ram, 3.5” disk drives, or better CPU (NEC V20) than the original IBM XT but they all ran MS DOS and WordPerfect and Accolade Test Drive and any other software you would expect so they were considered ‘XT clones’
- ssl-3 1y agoSure. I remember that marketplace very well. And until a couple of days ago, I never heard anyone mention an "XT clone" as being an emulated 80186 on an ESP32 with almost none of the IO or expansion capabilities of an XT. That appears to be a new usement of the term; an invention, if you will, or a perversion if you won't. (I can emulate an XT with my pocket supercomputer. It's fun to play with that kind of thing sometimes. But to call it a "clone" is going too far.)
- methuselah_in 1y agoDamn it looks so good. Great work buddy. kudos.
- badmonster 1y agoThis is an incredible project! For someone looking to build their own Evertop using this repo, are there any specific hardware schematics, component lists, or 3D print files included or planned to be shared in the future to help with replication?
- nottorp 1y ago> Note: if some videos won't play in Firefox, please try using Chrome. No thanks.
- api 1y agoFor a true prepper PC a RISC-V machine running Linux with these kinds of specs would be ideal. Even more cool would be a crank charger along with the solar panels. Outfit it with a LORA modem capable of running one of those peer to peer LORA mesh text messaging protocols.
- rbanffy 1y agoI love the idea of a full-size keyboard slate devices. The DevTerm is almost there, but my ideal would be the size of a TRS-80 model 100.
- basemaly 1y agoHow do I get one of these?
- vaylian 1y agoThis makes me wonder: Are there any solar-powered navigation computers? It would be cool to have an off-grid navigation computer that can load all openstreetmap tiles.
- meremortals 1y agoreminded me of https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html
- et-al 1y agoThe Garmin 540/840/1040 bike computers have a solar option but it’s not sufficient to completely power the device. It just slows the drain by a few points.
- BeefySwain 1y agoAnyone know what keyboard that is and where I could get my hands on one? Just the keyboard. Not the entire unit.
- JoelMcCracken 1y agoI use my boox max lumi as a secondary display daily for working in emacs. The eink is great for text/terminal use, the only issue I have is when i sometimes need to do any kind of mouse work (which, is basically never, when I use it for what I said above). What I really want is a low power linux laptop that is not entirely without CPU/memory power, so I can program some simple things on it. I don't mind if it has _less_ power, I can use ssh for anything that is overly cpu-hungry. Ive seen several devices that seem like they might suit my need, but I look at them for long enough and just won't pull the trigger. Either it seems overly much like a walled garden (like, I can program on the device, but it doesn't seem like a suitable spot to write blog posts in emacs for my blog or whatever), or its just too underpowered and I'm sure that 99% of the tools I use already won't work on it. I wish I had the EE knowledge/confidence to start hacking on this kind of thing. I think its very doable; I was just looking at e.g. https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/epaper-1/13.3inch-e-paper-hat.htm?___SID=U https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/epaper-1/... which is just cheap enough that I could see myself risking buying it without being sure that it will work with my other choices. Nowadays, I feel like I should be able to run most of what I want on an android device that is built for power, and it should have a fairly long lasting battery because of its design; attach a trackpad, keyboard, and eink display, and my perfect device is here. I don't care if its not the thinnest device in the universe, a swappable battery (or, just load the thing with extra batteries) plus perhaps a portable solar charger would be amazing.
- pineful 1y agoSome other comment mentioned the pinenote which was shown on https://fosstodon.org/@carbonatedcaffeine/114208672145631483 https://fosstodon.org/@carbonatedcaffeine/114208672145631483 a month ago. Sounds almost too good to be true, but I haven't tried it myself
- ericjenott 1y ago[dead]
- ofrzeta 1y agoGoodisplay says "Although the refresh rate of monochrome e-paper displays is faster than that of color e-paper, we still recommend allowing at least a 180-second interval after completing a set of display updates. Frequent updates can negatively impact the lifespan of the ePaper." https://www.good-display.com/news/80.html https://www.good-display.com/news/80.html So I guess playing Space Quest a lot will rapidly kill that screen.
- ericjenott 1y agoActually 100 hours is an understatement. It'll go at least 200 hours of constant active use on a single charge, even if you don't use power saving mode, and can easily get 500 hours or a lot more using power saving mode.