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Comment by uxp100 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been enjoying toying around with my beepy, but the display is pretty miserable. I’d say you almost need outdoor light to enjoy it. Lights on inside it’s fine, usable, but lots of tilting to get the best angle. And I’d love just a little larger size, maybe another row of text and some more columns.

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.

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i think i was the naysayer you're talking about (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35980709) and i have one slight correction

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

> so you can get a vax in your pocket that runs off a coin cell for six months

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.

so, a drawback of the apollo3 (and actually every cpu i've found with a decent deep-sleep state) over an actual vax is that it doesn't have virtual memory or much in the way of memory protection

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

I wish I had something useful to say, but that sounds honestly amazing. If you could do wifi at the same time, then that'd be a perfect email/ssh/irc device.

i think that the esp32 is probably a decent microcontroller to use for this purpose, in place of the pi zero; it does have a decent sleep mode and also wifi

its energy efficiency per instruction is not the best but is certainly acceptable

I actually almost exclusively use mine outside now. I sit outside on my deck with my cat lol. It’s a nice little after work treat of reading some blogs on lynx with a beer and a cat.

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 also got a Beepberry (which arrived as a Beepy, so I should probably stop deadnaming it) and I generally concur with your analysis. I'm definitely not getting anywhere near the top end of the projected battery life scale with a Pi Zero 2 W installed, nothing much useful fits on the display, and I have to sit under more light than I'd like hitting my eyeballs to read the screen.

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.

The T-deck is based on ESP32-S3 which has a 128b simd data path too. And apparently it can boot linux too [0] :). My ideal device would have

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.

[0] https://gojimmypi.github.io/ESP32-S3-Linux/

I can't imagine dropping Android for any other device, but ESP32 Linux looks like it has real potential.

I'd love to see it integrated with Arduino, so we could finally have easy to make, loadable, sharable apps on small devices.

Ooh, the T-Deck [1] looks pretty excellent, I agree. That BB keyboard...

1: https://www.lilygo.cc/products/t-deck

It is pretty nice isn't it. Now can someone please make one with a nice metal case and the ability to run android on it. Then I can basically have my replacement for my much missed Nokia E71.

Judging from pictures, it seems the user would be looking up from bottom side of the screen under normal uses. LCDs are not designed for that.

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.

these memory lcds seem to have a pretty wide viewing angle under sunlight

Why can the Pi not do low power like an Android phone can? Seems like there's enough use cases that it should be figured out by now and idle power should be under 50mA in some kind of wait for events mode.

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