Miniature Macintosh with Raspberry Pi | Hacker News Reader

Miniature Macintosh with Raspberry Pi

hackster.io

132 pointsrcarmo50 comments

I’d love to do a similar project with a Newton eMate - there’s easily enough space in the case for a pi, battery pack and any other bits needed, and it’s possible to get colour touch screens the same size as the old one.

Just need the time and skill to make it happen.

The problem is the software --- there doesn't seem to be any decent opensource handwriting recognition software --- Cellwriter leaves a lot to be desired, and the one project which worked well required copying a DLL for HWR from Windows Vista.

To say nothing of Newton Intelligence and the wonderful note-taking and calendar and so forth.

It kills me that my Kindle Scribe is so limited compared to my Newton MessagePad.

> It kills me that my Kindle Scribe is so limited compared to my Newton MessagePad.

My Boox Note 2 (which is somewhat old now, released late 2019) is much more fully featured, but again it still has mostly the same problem despite having full-fat Android at your stylus-tip; most of the software isn't made for this kind of user interaction.

The software that is (the reader, the note-taking software, etc. that Boox wrote) is excellent. Which makes it all the more sad that there's so little that is written to take advantage of it.

A fun project would be to somehow use the Newton ROM and some emulation layer to get this stuff working on your tablet. Don't know how feasible it is

The people who developed the newton handwriting recognition went on to work with WinCe and it has been embedded in every device with a touch screen since at least wince 5 when they started calling it windows mobile. It must have been written in C++

Einstein (https://github.com/pguyot/Einstein) supports iOS and partially supports Android. Watching https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SB_2DnLVFYI it doesn’t look performant, though.

Why not run Einstein and emulate an eMate 300?

How do you run third party software on a Kindle Scribe?

Probably a better idea to print a replica these days, they regularly go for $200+ USD these days

Are Raspberry Pi 4s in stock affordably anywhere that anyone can find?

Any idea on when specifically they will be? Last I heard was 2023 some time and we're almost halfway done.

Not an exact answer to your question, but where I work we've been using OKdo Rock 4C's [1] in place of Pi 4's, since they seem to be impossible to get.

From what I've heard from the people that are using them, they seem to be pretty decent, but unfortunately not quite a simple drop-in replacement.

[1] https://www.okdo.com/p/okdo-rock-4-model-c-4gb-single-board-...

Yes! As of this week my local Microcenter seems to be consistently restocking them, and from looking at rpilocator Adafruit has been getting stock in on most weekdays, though they still sell out. I think we're close to finally seeing the supply crunch end.

What are people using all these Raspberry Pis for? Is it really so needed that the price is becoming unaffordable? There are other components in stock, so I’m curious what’s demanding an RP4.

Raspberry Pi decided to focus on their business customers and meet their needs, so trying to find one at retail became difficult.

Yeah but is that really driving the price of them?

There's a great interview with Eben Upton that explains a lot of this, including what "Business customers" actually are (i.e. mostly mom and pop style enterprises)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_aL9V0JsQQ

More “official” stores never changed their prices. They just never had any.

PiShop in Canada, for example, still lists the Pi 4 4GB for $76.95, but rpi locator says last time it was in stock was June 2022. Some item’s have an empty field for last seen and I've been assuming that means the tool has never seen them in stock.

So I would have needed to find another way to get it, and scalpers/Amazon never waste a good crisis.

Just because something goes out of stock doesn’t mean the price will shoot up. There has to be enough demand for it. If there are alternatives (which there are), then the demand won’t increase with shortened supply, it’ll actually decrease at the same rate (or more, if the reputation of ‘hard to acquire’ sticks).

Always assumed it was just momentum. They are beginner friendly.

If you need tutorials, a community, and some sort of support, you have to buy a Pi.

Maybe it is different now, but other SBCs just haven’t had those in the past. Raspberry Pis are unique in that sense.

You would think this would be the moment to disrupt the market, but I haven't seen much going on. I like my Orange Pi 5 though.

I currently have a Pi 2 that I use as a pie hole DNS server, a Pi 4 that I play some retro games on and occasionally use as a desktop PC, and a Pi 0 WH that I'm trying to use to reprogram the flash chip on a different device.

I used to have a few more, but I put them on eBay last year. I figured I was doing my part to lessen the shortage, and I'll replace them whenever they come back into regular supply.

It’s weird because all these things can be done with other (better) hardware. The supply chain issues of high-performance semiconductors makes sense to me because there is no alternative. If the price is going up, it really demonstrates the sheer indifference to price people have when it comes to low-cost computing. That is, the value of an RP is in its package and not its price.

I really hope it’s not ignorance instead of indifference. Building a computer, even a tiny one, is not hard.

Raspberry Pis also get put in to all sorts of places where an embedded board could be used, but the Pi is so much easier.

I want to build a digital picture frame with an e-ink frame that pulls photos from a server. The right way would be a low powered processor, but then I have to figure out writing the image, sleep states and wake up, setting up networking etc. in whatever programming language my embedded board supports.

Or I can just plug in a pi, and live with the always on power consumption.

It's not that I'm ignorant, but I have a limited amount of time and may prioritize project completion over doing it completely right.

I guess everyone has a different way of building things. I think I would just find an e-reader that has a healthy modding community and rely on that.

I think the low price of the Raspberry Pi helped build a community, and now that community is sustaining it's popularity even though the availability dropped and the price skyrocketed.

> I really hope it’s not ignorance instead of indifference.

It's a special kind of weird to worry about whether the people who are interested in a SBC you're not interested in are "ignorant."

> If the price is going up

It's not, so you can stop worrying about that.

The price going up was something in the original comment. I guess that isn’t even true and this whole conversation is pointless.

They are very powerful and practical for their sizes. This is why some people, incl. me, absolutely love them.

I have plethora of this SBCs. A Raspberry Pi 4 is acting as a HiFiBerry system at my parents' home, replacing a component Hi-Fi. With high end 2x35W amplifier and quite a nice software stack, my parents can listen whatever they wish to do with their old high quality speakers in a very practical manner. Sound quality is superb, too. HiFiBerry amplifiers are no slouch.

I ran an OrangePi Zero/512MB with BitTorrent, DNS, FTP, Syncthing, WebFS http server. It served as the perfect home server.

I'm currently setting up an OrangePi 5B with 8GB RAM to replace my old desktop computer's duties. Cloud backups, video encoding, local DNS, etc. Also, it'll take over the previous Zero's roles too, and with almost no cables, it'll replace and even supersede my old Desktop computer, and make my life much easier.

These things are immensely useful.

> These things are immensely useful

I have a RPi2 that is running a weather website since 2014. Same SD card, insane uptime, and virtually zero maintenance.

My other RPi's serve has my Homebridge, Wireguard endpoint, Tailscale exit node, DNS server, Plex, git repos....

Crazy how useful they are.

Having a small cluster of these is very fun as a homelab, esp. when combined with 5 port switches from TP-Link and others.

I prefer to merge them to a one powerful server, because I already have more than enough servers at the office, and want to keep a minimalist home as much as possible.

If the MIMO Wi-Fi chipset works as promised, I'll only attach a single disk and power to this thing, and tuck it away somewhere. What's nice is, Rockchip systems have "heartbeat" LEDs on them, so I'll be able to see whether it's running or not with a single glance.

I have two:

- one runs a copy of the (now offline) old Shapeoko wiki/forums for reference purposes (much easier than using the Wayback Machine)

- the second is in a tablet case and controls a CNC machine

I'd like a 3rd to use with a Wacom One tablet screen --- perhaps Einstein will run on that?

I don’t have an answer to your question. But I had quite a bit of trouble finding a affordable, drop-in replacement Raspberry Pi for a recent project, so I went looking for alternatives. There are a number of companies that make comparable single board computers and sell them at the $35 price point, for example LibreComputer. The board I received was very nicely put together and worked well for my purposes. The only practical difference between the clone and the genuine Pi was the lack of a Pi-branded GPIO library.

I have gotten a couple of Orange Pi 5Bs recently. For a 8GB 4B's price, I have 16 GB of RAM, 128GB of internal storage, 8 cores (4 Low Performance + 4 High Performance), a video encoder works on tons of formats, AI accelerator for image recognition tasks, MIMO WIFI 6 and BT 5.

Feels like a huge bargain, considering I need the video encoders and high network speed in the first place.

I have seen a number of stores in the UK, US and Netherlands got big chunks of stock in the past weeks (via https://rpilocator.com/). Obviously it sells out super quick so you need to be following their stock notifications (and make sure you follow their prerequisites as a lot of stores require you to have accounts that have purchase history to weed out the scalpers).

The original had an M68k @8MHz w/ 128k of RAM. It might be possible to emulate it on a Raspberry Pi Pico which has 2x133MHz Arm with w/ 264k of RAM for an even smaller package. This has been done on an ESP32 which has similar specs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBiQgLlgcnA

Lol, I'd actually prefer it to be in a life-sized (i.e. Mac Classic-sized) package, so it's more usable as an actual computer. I suppose as a piece of hacker-oriented performance art, having a teeny Mac with a teeny tiny screen is also fun, but think of what you could do with all that extra space inside the case!

I like this project where Trammel Hudson drives a Mac SE CRT with a BeagleBone Black, translates keyboard signals, etc. So you have a real Mac on the outside, with modern internals.

https://trmm.net/Mac-SE_video/

Oh, yeah. Now that's a project I like. Even supposing I had a broken, ~30-35 year old Mac and a BeagleBone hanging around, I'm not sure I could have gotten too much past "program the BB to be a video card" lol :)

I just love the creativity that's out there in the world sometimes, you know?

This is like the 20th reason why I need to get a filament in the retro computer beige color.

This filament: https://www.printedsolid.com/products/jessie-pla-1-75mm-x-1k... claims to be a direct match for the Amiga 500 beige. I don't have one to compare it to, but it's pretty close to some of the beige machines I do have

The real question is does it turn nut brown on one side if you leave it next to the window for ten years.

Out of curiosity: can you list some of the other reasons?

Sure! I’ve got a Tandy T-100 that I want to mod/repair/do something with. The needed electrical repairs are beyond my soldering ability, so I’m gonna try to hand off the internals to someone at a vintage computer fair. I also have an old handheld radio project that I want to mod to put a Pi in. Need the matching color to make it thicker to actually fit the components I have.

And I’m in the middle of printing a case for an eReader I’m building. I wrote the software in Python and it has mechanical keyboard switches for the buttons. It’s the main reason I bought a 3D printer, because it was previously built out of an AirPods box. Seems like it’d be cool in this beige.

Fine, I exaggerated. I have 3 other uses lol

Really interesting, especially the eReader idea! Thank you for taking the time to answer.

Yes, but are all the contributors’ signatures printed on the inside of the case? ;)

This might be sacrilegious, but I've made a bit of a hobby of repairing old Macs. When I really bring one back from the dead, I add my signature to the inside (in pencil, of course)

Unfortunately this kind of projects are sort of held back from the lack of decent emulators for the classic environment - Credits where it's due to Basilisk/Sheepshaver/Minivmac and their authors, but their age and limitations nowadays are showing[1].

Wish I had the skills to write anything equivalent to Dosbox for the 68K Macintosh scene, let alone something anywhere close to PcEm.

[1]https://invisibleup.com/articles/30/

I'd be super interested in a G3. Much more finishing work I'd imagine, but may what a great case design.

Note to self: Order 3.5" Fresnel lens, and 'Brazil' sticker.

I wonder if my original Mac will still boot…

If it bongs, but doesn't light up, give the right side a gentle smack and see if it flickers. In fact, almost any sign of life is a good indication that it can be restored. Take the battery out, if you haven't already!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com