Review: Beepy a Palm-Sized Linux Hacking Playground
hackaday.com
hackaday.com
When the device was announced some naysayer here on HN said, hey, that display is lame and the raspberry pi is a bad choice for battery applications, mcus with better options for deep sleep could make this a device with a battery life measured in days, not hours. And despite calling them a naysayer I’d say they are completely right.
I don’t regret buying it anyway, though.
Incidentally, there exists now a functional analogue - complete with scavenged BB keyboard - sporting an ESP32 and a backlit screen in place of the Pi0 and memory LCD: the Liligo T-Deck. I don't need one, and I won't write software that runs on it, but I still want one because cute LoRa thing.
uC - ESP32/nrf Display - Memory LCD Keypad LoRa GPS LTE (optional) And yes - opensource firmware
Will happily drop the smartphone for such an above device.
I'd love to see it integrated with Arduino, so we could finally have easy to make, loadable, sharable apps on small devices.
i think the display is fucking awesome
just. not for this
for applications where its lack of backlight and grayscale mean you get a significantly longer battery life, or smaller battery, or no battery at all
being able to maintain the display on 50μW means you can run it off a cr2032 coin cell for 17 months
if you pair that with a cpu that's using some similar amount of power, probably due to being in a low-power deep-sleep mode 99+% of the time, you can get a month or two of interactive computing out of a coin cell. a sleeping esp32 is supposedly around 10μW, and at full speed it's about 200 32-bit mips at 1 watt. microcontrollers are typically an order of magnitude lower energy per instruction. ambiq's microcontrollers are two orders of magnitude lower, like 30 picojoules per instruction, so 100 μW should give you 3 mips
400×240 is half the screen resolution of the original macintosh, and the same as the vt100, though with a different aspect ratio
so you can get a vax in your pocket that runs off a coin cell for six months
that's motherfucking amazing
but that is not this product
which reminds me, i'm late for a pairing session on a jit compiler targeting the ambiq apollo3 ultra-low-power 48 megahertz cortex-m4f
I mentioned this last time as well; I hope someone makes this device like that. I would be happy with it. The apollo3 is nice and I enjoy working with it. I would implement a little OS for fun for a device like this if it existed.
On the form factor; a clamshell would be better.
my current plan is for my nascent jit compiler to implement paged virtual memory using bytecodes for paged-load-byte, paged-load-halfword, paged-load-word, paged-load-multiple, paged-store-byte, paged-store-halfword, paged-store-word, and paged-store-multiple, so that i can compile existing c to its bytecode instruction set; these will be implemented by calls to millicode subroutines
c call and return, argument passing, and accesses to local variables whose addresses are never taken, can be provided by mechanisms that don't involve accessing a paged virtual memory space
i think, and i might be wrong about this, that this will be sufficient to run things like libpng and pcc at useful speeds
if not, i might have to lean harder on making the jit compiler smart
what approach would you take
i very much agree about the clamshell; that would also make it possible to include a keyboard big enough to touch-type on
its energy efficiency per instruction is not the best but is certainly acceptable
But I hate using it inside. I almost want like one of the gameboy worm lights adapted to this.
I also don’t regret buying this at all.
I think an "alpha" version cases should be basis for PCB, and both should co-develop. The "case will be available later" approach is only acceptable for benchtop prototypes.
basically, i said the ultra-low-power screen is wasted by using a cpu that uses ten thousand times as much power
it would make more sense to use either an ultra-low-power cpu, getting orders of magnitude more battery life (and probably reducing the weight and charge time of the battery), or a screen that takes advantage of the orders of magnitude more power available, with features such as backlighting, grayscale (the memory lcd is really only black and white with no shades of gray), or even color
summary from the thread:
> unfortunately, their current design seems to have a fatal flaw that renders it useless for its intended purpose ['a weekend chat device' according to erohead], but one that's easily fixed
> my comments are not shitting on it; they explain how to fix it, providing information the original designers were evidently unaware of, so that they can ship a product that fulfills its intended purpose, which would probably make them a few tens of thousands of dollars. up to them if they want to do it or not; i'm not an investor. if they don't, probably someone else will
comments here from people who are trying the device seem to support my calculation that the battery only lasts the few hours i calculated rather than the intended weekend
tl;dr I'm certain this is coming
i had an instance of the first blackberry (which was before the 'blackberry' branding; it just said 'rim, research in motion'), and it had the best handheld keyboard i've ever used. the later blackberry keyboards seem quite reasonable too
Just make those with a slightly more powerful/modern SoC and let me run Pidgin.
Avoid these chancers.
There is a Discord (that they rarely appear in) where people try to make sense of the random collection of buggy software - but it is a chore.
I like tinkering and exploring. But I get the impression that they think their customers appreciate the level of disrespect SQFMI show them.
But I think the appeal is that these little basically unsupported boards are inexpensive and do have a community that will help, hidden away on discord.
Actually, if you consider Android, that would be around billions.
Would be cool to have a linux shell running in a smartcard though.
This is even more true than the article states.
The largest demographic of linux users is certainly "people who own a television".
Almost all modern TVs run linux...
probably the number of tvs is much smaller than the number of android phones though; tvs are a luxury good while android phones have become a basic necessity
There's https://pyra-handheld.com/ but it's semi-existent not-quite-vaporware for about a decade already (props on the staying power of looking to get this project finished, though!)
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme...
it's already banned from updating in google play
There's people on youtube that have done this. They're basically off the shelf parts and a raspi glued together in an awkward brick of wires and electronics.
I'm interested in learning how to get the hardware all working together, but also making wacky UI that deviate from normal smart phones.
Too bad I'm lazy!
Anyway, the reason I found it interesting is that it uses a repurposed BlackBerry keyboard, which I’m sure will have great effect. Most modern mini-handhelds have dismal input methods.
I never understood the purpose of these things, other than using them for 10 minutes.