Lisp Badge LE | Hacker News Reader

Lisp Badge LE

technoblogy.com

271 pointsrcarmo48 comments

This is a really cool project. I wish I was better at doing electronics construction, wish I could just buy one too. 40 hours of life on a coin battery is pretty impressive.

You can buy one. The link is at the bottom of the article.

Looks like that’s only the pcb though? Or am I clicking the wrong link?

I am also curious about having an assembled one.

I'd love to buy this for my 8 year old - this week I taught her how to check her homework on elisp. The idea is to familiarize her with lisp syntax a bit to prime her for programing in the future.

I was between calc (RPN) or lisp (elisp) for their simple syntax. The way I see it LISP's REPL loop is simple enough to teach a kid. And I may be right: after teaching her to verify a two argument operation she got a three argument question. She did:

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You can order one through a link on that site, can it be only $23? That's what pcbway.com says. I need a more turnkey approach, someone tell me what to do to get a working board I can just plug in an use. If you ask for "assembly" then it was adding almost $100.

Thats just the board, I think

because of the display and low power use, I'd pay somewhere between 75 and $100 for one of them in a plastic case with some easy power supply/connection like maybe a usb plug-in port?

It's such a cool display and keyboard. Another cool thing (that I'd pay for!) is to attach that to a rasberry pi.

May I ask what's the point of attaching a standalone computer to a raspberry pi?

The display and keyboard would be fun to have where I interact with the ras pi directly; I don't need to attach another sbc to a ras pi of course; but where is there such a neat display and keyboard that I could get for a pi? I have several rasp pi, I wish they had an inexpensive display and keyboard like this one. I could use it for commands on the shell.

But it's mostly to play with.

That's just a great form factor! In such a situation, I was thinking you could use the cpu to communicate with the ras pi somehow, ssh into it? It's just a neat form factor with that compact keyboard and display, using such little power.

By itself it's fun too, but I'm not going to do much assembly work, not doing anything that takes soldering. I'm just terrible at that kind of stuff. If I could buy a complete little computer like that, with some kind of storage maybe, it would be neat. I didn't understand how much effort it would take to get an actual working system that I could type on like the original poster.

I love this guy. I ran across him trying to self teach about embedded electronics and his site is one of the best I’ve found both for interesting projects and good instructional examples.

I love his projects too. He's also the creator of uLisp. (If it weren't clear from the article.)

http://www.ulisp.com/

40 hours with a coin battery is impressive, but I think it is a bad decision in terms of environmental friendliness.

"The Lisp Badge LE draws only 6mA from its CR2032 button cell, and so should have a life of about 40 hours"

I suppose that's 6mA when the CPU (MCU here) is active. In idle mode that ought to be much lower (the low power monochrome display, not eInk, draws only 30µA as stated separately). Does uLisp support idle mode? Uh, apparently not automatically, but requires the user to call a SLEEP function ...

Indeed. Are there rechargeable coin cells?

Yes, look for LIR2032 batteries.

ulisp is great - I have it running on a little neopixel matrix I use to flag when I'm on video: https://github.com/dannyob/signpost

I'm ashamed of how much power that sucks down compared to this badge though!

I’ve used uLisp via the serial port. In that mode of provides a cool structured Lisp editor (easily navigate sexps). I wonder if the display one here does the same thing.

I'd totally buy a fully assembled one but I wonder how much it would go for.

For the kids its be great

Same.

This guy’s projects are a fave of mine, especially the tiny computers like this and the audio projects. And the tiny photography is great!

Quite cool, specially how the keyboard and special symbols being taken care of.

i love the full keyboard- any time someone says they wouldn't benefit from learning vi bindings because they 'spend more time thinking than typing' i hand them one of these

Vi bindings come surprisingly in handy while typing in the terminal on my smartphone even.

Yeah, surprised me as well when I was trying different ways of editing text and sometimes code via touch keyboard, vim bindings was the easiest way by far.

Wish someone would build this in a casing etc : especially the 40 hour our on a coin cell. 3d printed should work, but I don’t have time and would just like to buy it complete.

Arg, I'd love one of these, but my project backlog has backlogs. As others have commented, I'd buy a fully assembled unit.

This is really awesome. Kind of like a programmable calculator but super powerful that you can take anywhere!

I’d love if old Blackberry shells became standard casing for such projects. Perfect keyboard, good display size.

Blackberry-compatible motherboard with appropriate keys and nothing more may be done relatively easy, but where to get drivers for the display and the sensor joystick?

Display and joystick goes on the PCB anyway. Just use what works. Bigger problem is BlackBerry, or anyone to be in their position, won't like that being done at scale.

Display and multitouch definitely has to be reused, it is almost retina on later models.

Excessive. Interlisp TTY editor requires only one line display.

TTY as in paper?

It's not quite 1 line, you have a history, you can display an arbitrary amount of lines at once.

Dammit I haven't finished populating the last lisp badge.

My part list is still on and the display is in my part bin so far. Hope this one may fair better. Realky want one.

Populating?

@randomcarbloke probably means installing/soldering the components onto the board. E.g., https://www.digikey.com/en/maker/blogs/2021/how-to-populate-...

Exactly, a very generous chap on here sent me a spare PCB for the lisp badge.

This is way too cool.

First thing I looked for was dedicated parentheses keys, was not disappointed.

https://neo-layout.org/ has em under your strongest fingers, after holding down a modkey.

Probably should have put them on the center of the keyboard, though :)

Or in the back or top, like gamepad triggers/bumpers!

Should have a spare set.

"The connection to www.technoblogy.com is not secure You are seeing this warning because this site does not support HTTPS. Learn more"

It's 2023 people. How can you justify no https on a technology blog?

Easy, the owner doesn't care about the data served from their source gets MITM'ed.

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