Popcorn Computer’s Pocket P.C. Open Sourced
blog.popcorncomputer.com
blog.popcorncomputer.com
I love these kinds of projects, but after being burned by the PocketCHIP, who also said this but never made it there, this is isn't somewhere I want to go again.
Crazy, I know. Investing in difficult R&D problems to produce a quality product is not a good business model. It's so much easier to churn out a working devkit and ask for pull requests.
Sorry for the snark and pessimism, but that's what happens when you keep getting burned. This statement does not inspire confidence:
>Finally, to ensure that Pocket P.C. has great software support out of the box, we have requested embedded development help from the community.
Why is software always an afterthought with these projects? Especially a project like this, which has clearly seen an enormous amount of effort put into the hardware design.
> TRYING TO BUILD THE ULTIMATE RASPBERRY PI COMPUTER (ZERO TERMINAL V3)
This can go either way, in my experience. I’ve worked with software developers who do a terrible job with hardware, and hardware developers who do a terrible job with software. Best I can tell, it’s a problem that’s existed since we started making computers.
In some ways, I think it’s arrogance. The rockstar software developer believes that software is infinitely more complex than the hardware it runs on. The ninja EE believes that software is trivial. And they both assume that they can effectively do each others’ jobs.
Sounds like starlink antennae won’t be small enough for a long time, so that leaves who besides Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Apple?
What if we didn’t? Instead of removing the volume, can we put something in it? Take this one for instance. How many layers does a keyboard trace need? 2? 3? How many things can you stuff on the backside of the keyboard? Between? Under?
I can imagine sys admins would like this for remote admin.
I can't think off the top of my head why general hackers would keep this in their pockets most of the time.
Well and I'm not one of those, but I'm still seriously considering getting it - or rather, the cheaper version without LoRa. I can't really tell you anything from the top of my head, but back when I had my N900, it found so many unexpected uses constantly. Having a full-blown Linux machine in your pocket is a seriously different game than any of the current gen of smartphones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5#/media/File:200...
and shove modern hardware/screen into it running stock gnu/linux.
As far as I can tell, it can dualboot linux and android (or even sailfish OS!)
As for use cause. I don't know. Nice to have a keyboard but I'm carrying two phones around now which is kind of stupid. The front display it total garbage, slow ui and useless.
Their next model seems more practical as the screen is on the outside allowing use without having to fold open the keyboard which is kind of annoying on the gemini.
Truth be told, its only really usable when running android. BUT:
* its easily rooted (the bootloader is open, and Planet provide a rooted android image)
* with Termux (or a full chroot of your choice), you do get most of the way towards "the linux experience"
Early batches may have been hit or miss. Mine was from the 2nd indiegogo batch, and all I can say is, hardware-wise, its really good.
I've used it HEAVILY over the last couple of years. Dropped it a few times. They keyboard is good. It does have genuine tactile feedback. Given the size limitations, its brilliant.
And yes, I did have more than 1 Psion back in the day (from the calculator-style model, all the way to the famed Psion 5).
And as far as keyboard feel is concerned, on my desktop, I use ergonomic mechanical keyboards (ergodox & atreus62) with various switch types - which means that yes - I am a bit picky when it comes to keyboards.
And I have to say that, given the size limitations, the Gemini keyboard is a marvel. Its genuinely usable. I also have a GPD Pocket. Thats significantly larger, with a chiclet style keyboard.
The Gemini keyboard blows it out of the water.
I have no qualms over opening up termux, and neovim or joe, switching between multiple tabs, buffers and embedded terminals, and banging out some code.
(although I do wish they had used an ortholinear layout for the keyboard, and I wish I could properly remap the layout a la qmk)
As a phone, it has its limitations. But, if you pair it with a smartwatch, many of those limitations can be overcome. Its been my only phone for over a year.
On a final note, nothing beats being able to sit in front of a large screen android-enabled tv, pull out my phone/pda/psion-remake, connect via miracast, and just bang away ....
Its a hoot :)
(genuinely asking for ideas)
Many more radios, but many fewer buttons and pixels.
It's nice that we have so many options for tiny computers these days, but sooner or later, someone is going to have to find something useful to do with them.
The UI and developer experience has never gotten quite good enough to drive a market the size of smartphones or laptops, so...what are we doing here? Is it time to acknowledge that the masses don't particularly want general-purpose computing machines? That there isn't much of a market for anything that isn't plug-and-play? That's a depressing thought.
Looking at that pocket pc website... If that usb c port could drive a display it might be interesting to dock that thing and get a full desktop experience. Then take your work with you when you are ready to go mobile. On buses and trains or other places where it might be clumsy to use a laptop.
I guess this was a thing many people have fantasized about for a long time but nobody has really made practical. I guess laptops, phones and tablets being separate entities is good enough.
“Pocket P.C. w/ LoRa packs a LoRa radio capable of low power, long range communication ideal for IoT developers. Build custom LoRa peer-to-peer applications or build apps for the rapidly growing worldwide LoRaWAN community. With access to LoRaWAN at your finger tips you can prototype and build cutting edge applications faster than ever. Ready to operate on frequencies EU868, US915, and AS923.
Pocket P.C. w/ LoRa is the tool for developing LoRa solutions on the go.
”
All off the shelf and any engineering team could clone it in a few days while substantially undercutting their price. I'd place bets someone already has. The cheaper clones will probably beat their flashy device to market and work better.
But they'll do fine regardless because branding matters way more than it should.
They're selling a fashion accessory targeting the fanboy tech crowd. They haven't thought of putting a clip on the bottom so you could wear it in public yet, but it's probably coming soon. They're running a bunch of ads for it on social media.
It's really irritating how transparent and obvious of a smoke and mirrors act it is AND how successful that strategy is.
Good on them for making the play but bad on us for hitching on to any caravan that sells silicon like it's the National Enquirer.
Anyway, here you go https://flipperzero.one/one
And the $2.3 million they've raised in 9 days https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/flipper-devices/flipper...
> All off the shelf and any engineering team could clone it in a few days while substantially undercutting their price
Perhaps. And perhaps Dropbox is just a glorified rsync FTP target. (Sarcasm here, boiling down to saying that talk is cheap, shipping is hard)
> They're selling a fashion accessory targeting the fanboy tech crowd
I guess that makes me a 'fanboy tech' then.
Unlike the breadboard + parts + wires + needed case of some kind + SBC/microcontroller +need to learn yet another proglang or dialect to make whatever you built DO something, this device comes with a working battery, controls, screen, Bluetooth and U2F, NFC cloning out of the box. No instructables or breadboard required!
While I'm interested in circuit design, there are no simple books that will take you from plugging in a battery to a single led to something that can run c code. Maybe NAND to Tetris? Have had a hard time finding a physical book for that.
Learning to do embedded stuff as a result would require more time than I'm willing to invest right now vs what I could get done by reusing old phones or retro computers to do stuff, or by purchasing a Turn-Key device like this.
And for once the marketing may mean that these people have answers to questions, and do not disappear for months on end while the engineering types silently work and don't dare talk about their problems. Sort of like the opaque development of signal versus the open development of this week in matrix.
at the very least, the dolphin character and marketing or branding on this device shows that there is at least some ux care taken, and there will be at least one or two glossy coats of paint applied over top the bare metal. I compare this to something like a Chinese pen plotter that while technically being only a cheaper version of the do-it-yourself pen plotter or axidraw, has much worse software that barely works and is not intuitive.
Regarding the flipper itself, I purchased it to function as a simple NFC clone for my work badge if I ever go back to work, and as a u2f key manger since I don't already have one of those, not as a hacking or embedded development aid.
Those capabilities and gpio pens are optional to me as a user, which may confirm your suspicions, I don't know.
Like most finished products, this device can provide a high-value to user supplied code ratio. There's definitely a place for devices that are 'merely' hardware and a software platform that enable a one-to-one value to user supplied code device... even I run things like pihole on a dedicated raspberry pi zero since the cost benefit is there. Why, at some point, I'm going to learn native Linux development so that I can write applications for the pine phone whenever it comes out with a keyboard. not everything has to be a completely finished product with applications after all.
Having the ability to hack on something is great, but this fanboy prefers to purchase products that can actually do something for him, yet are extensible, as opposed to buying some pcbs and hoping that one day some way somehow you can make them do something. I have enough almost started weekend projects already :)
/End rant , thanks for your patience with my clumsy delivery skills
I don't want to address any other point, but I can share an experience here.
I went from very basic electronics knowledge (what most discrete components do in the abstract for, though not how to use them properly) to building a couple of SBCs by googling "home brew 6502" and reading whatever came up. I was a very rewarding journey, though there was certainly no book, I had to follow up on a lot of things myself.
Obviously a home brew 6502 won't do much modern, but you'll be left with way more knowledge than you need to build something with bare microcontroller / cpu and the kind of SPI/i2c bus peripherals you're talking about here.
Certainly it's a bunch of effort, but everything is there is you want to research it, and the 6502 forums are stupidly helpful.
Just in case you decide you do want to persue more DIY digital logic. It's well within reach!
PS. Nand to tetris is an awesome project, but it's waaay overkill for what you're talking about. There is a huge amount of cpu and compiler design that you don't need. And actually, not enough electrical engineering...
They got someone to probably use solidworks for the case design and they have some brilliant artists but beyond that you can buy all of these components online and basically snap them together, read some short documentation and be on your way.
Their initial goal was $60k, which would have covered 500 units which they probably presumed they'd be manually involved with each of them so it was basically set up for exactly what I described. They just had some runaway success, which is the problem because they still only have a cheap project that takes no special talent or time
I'm mostly jealous how much of success is just pure luck like this
I just finished routing an LPDDR4 bus (high speed + low voltage => worst case signal integrity) between two BGAs with signals routed on only 3 layers. The catch is that you need each high speed bus to be comfortably sandwiched between solid copper planes. Layers dedicated to reference planes start to add up quite quickly when you've got RAM, eMMC, ethernet, wifi, camera input, display output, SD card, etc all crossing over and through each other.
What you're probably seeing is that someone paneled the PCB 16 times.
The build quality was amazing, and so was the Silicon graphics display.
I suspect such retrospective revisionist reports are designed to precisely do that, render confusion. For instance, according to wikipedia, Windows NT was never designed with the Internet in mind. Whatever that's supposed to mean.
- square screen, possibily of higher resolution - high quality tactile switch keyboard, optimized for thumb typing - useable in bare PCB form (maybe with a two PCB sandwich) - similar design aesthetics as the pocket operators from Teenage Engineering, but built as a powerful full featured pocket computer for hackers