Commodore 64 BASIC inside a USB Connector | Hacker News Reader

Commodore 64 BASIC inside a USB Connector

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124 pointsatesti25 comments

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Only 6380 basic bytes free?

Edit: the device only has 8KB

https://tomu.im/

6400 bytes ought to be enough for anybody!

Reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17459041

Above blind link goes to:

Analysis of USB fan given to journalists at North Korea-Singapore Summit [pdf] (cam.ac.uk)

161 points by danso 3 days ago

It would be nice to see some photos of the package made to adapt the miniboard to the USB connector. (Or the upper part in the photo has the right wires to just fit in a USB slot?)

The underside of the PCB has the necessary contacts: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/tomu/

It runs the real C64 basic on top of 6502 processor emulator.

$30 + $5 shipping is “super cheap”? And I have to make my own case for it to be usable? I can buy like 20 ESP8266s for that price. Neat device, and I’ll probably still end up buying one at some point, but that’s pretty damned expensive for what it is, in my opinion.

$35 for two, $110 for ten, etc.

Well, it's an $1.5 chip on $0.1 board (add $0.4 for leds, solder, ets). The rest is for manual work (assembly) and a nice margin.

Anyway, if you are looking for best price, try chinese "blue pill" controller boards (<$2 a piece), they have more processing power (with similar ARM CM3 cpu). But not that nice form-factor.

The idea is to be an open source, cheap replacement for an Yubikey Nano style devices (and hopefully in response they will price their devices more reasonably than the >$50 USD it costs now).

I would love what happened to the "blue pill" to happen to the Tomu board. It would be awesome for Chinese manufacturers to take the design and make cheap clones.

What does "blue pill" mean in this context?

It’s this microcontroller board: http://wiki.stm32duino.com/index.php?title=Blue_Pill

They are dirt cheap and can be found for around $2 on sites like AliExpress etc.

I don't know why this is being downvoted. The EFM32 is about $1.20@1ku, the rest of the BOM adds up to a few cents, so a no-name Chinese manufacturer could sell these for less than $3 shipped and make a reasonable profit.

I understand that they have development costs to recoup, but their offer is anything but "super cheap". Even without quantity price breaks, I could build ten for $30.

There are suppliers that you can give the pcb file and BOM and they will make and assemble small runs (10 or so) for cheap. It's open hardware too, so you can just head over to the hardware repo and do that if you don't want to support them.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted.

I agree, it's not "super cheap" as it advertises itself. $30 is at the upper end of a whole range of similar devices available now. For example, you can get an Onion Omega2 for $5 ASSEMBLED, and you can run a full LAMP stack on it.

I've been a frequent critic of the Omega2, but it runs rings around the Tomu.

No, it can't fit inside a USB port, but it's not much but holding one right now, it's not much bigger than my thumb.

Now, if some person smarter than me could figure out how to run a C-64 emulator on on Omega, that would be awesome. I've heard it already runs NES emulators.

Buy a 100 pack, then they are only $9.05 each, which while still more expensive than the ESP8266s (at ~$7.00) is getting closer. The devices from CrowdSupply all ship with nice injection moulded cases.

You are also quite welcome (and encouraged) to build your own!

The schematics, PCB and even case design are open source. The board is designed with 6mil/6mil design rules making it compatible with everything like OHS Park, Seeed, or Dirty PCBs (all of them have been previously tested). The Tomu being so small with the Dirty PCB protopack would get you like ~75-125 boards for like ~$25 USD. All the other parts are available from Digikey too.

The idea is to be an open source, cheap and hackable replacement for an Yubikey Nano style devices (and hopefully in response they will price their devices more reasonably than the >$50 USD it costs now).

It would be awesome for Chinese manufacturers to take the design as is and make cheaper clones.

We have a policy of sending anyone who sends the project pull requests free Tomu boards.

Suggesting someone waste $870 by buying 100x as many as they need is not helpful. Your numbers for the ESP are wrong - I can get one for less than $2. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Free-shipping-ESP8266-serial...

Yea, even the ESP32 on a more user friendly package like NodeMCU or WeMos are still under $5. So he appears to really be downplaying the markup.

If you think you can do better, please do! I will be sure to buy plenty when you deliver your cheaper version.

$30??

Digispark is kind janky in comparison but same specs (attiny85) and not much bigger, and it’s like a buck a part on aliexpress.

I guess it kinda looks like a yubikey, so if you’re DIYing something like that maybe the price point isn’t so bad.

Not to justify the price, but attiny85 is a much smaller micro - it's a little 8-bit AVR, where the yubikey is using a 32-bit ARM M0+.

Is the Microsoft Easter egg there? Try "WAIT 6502, 1"...

That was the PET.

For those interested, this would write "MICROSOFT!" over top of "COMMODORE" on the PET startup screen.

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