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If only for the integrated FPGA, I'm interested! One suggestion: it could be made cheaper and maybe more interesting by removing the screen altogether (there's
by guylhem 14y ago
If only for the integrated FPGA, I'm interested!
One suggestion: it could be made cheaper and maybe more interesting by removing the screen altogether (there's an HDMI port !) to do a C64-like computer, with a tiny smartphone-like internal screen.
We all have multiple screens already - such as tablets or smartphones we carry.
- nrp 14y agoPresumably the board will also be offered on it's own, without anything connected to the LVDS interface. One of Bunnie's previous projects, the Chumby, is available this way. https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10106 https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10106
- georgemcbay 14y agoSparkFun is awesome, one of my favorite places to buy hardware hackery stuff along with Adafruit and Newark, but if you want to hack on this board for cheaper you can buy Insignia Infocast 3.5 units off ebay for around $40, half the price. The board inside is virtually the same as the Chumby Hacker Board (different arrangements of some of the headers and ports, IIRC) and it comes with a wifi module, 3.5 inch LCD w/resistive touchscreen, speakers, etc. At $80 for the Chumby Hacker Board most people are better off just buying a rasp-pi, the CPU and memory in it crush the falconwing board and there's a much larger active community of people hacking on it so you get easy access to newer linux kernel versions, distros, etc, but at $40 and including the LCD/touchscreen, wifi, speakers, etc [infocast|chumby One] are still a great deal to use just for hacking on. Still slower than the pi but having the lcd touchscreen/accelerometer/speakers/bend sensor buttons/wifi/etc gives you a lot of stuff to hack on out of the box that you'll have to pay extra for on the pi.
- mrb 14y agoBut no tablet or phone have an HDMI input (only output).
- guylhem 14y agoImagine a battery-powered C64-like device (ie "all in one", the motherboard just below the keyboard) with a tiny LCD screen (no bigger than your smartphone) and a real-sized keyboard. Now imagine doing RDP or VNC to "display" the screen on your tablet or your phone - there are browser-side VNC clients that are easy to use, you wouldn't even have to install a VNC client. Unless you want to playback movies, IMHO there is no need for an HDMI input No big LCD = longer runtime (or throw in an eink display - framerate is not that important). I would be willing pay a premium if it also included a breadboard connecting to the various internal ports. That would be a real hacky laptop, a workbench for geeks.
- lsc 14y agoIn early highschool, I carried around one of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Radio_Shack_TRS-80_Model_100.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Radio_Shack_TRS-80_Model_1... Which seems to me like the best form factor you can have if you can't have a flip-up monitor.
- marssaxman 14y agoYou use computers very differently than I do! What a lot of workarounds just to get a normal laptop experience.