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Comment by geokon | Hacker News Reader

From looking at the slides it looks like a really impressive project.

But I can't help but feel like very low cost full-blown Linux devices are right around the corner. Ex: https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/02/08/licheerv-nano-low-co...

If you can run full blown Debian on your wrist soon, why bother with this severely restricted device that are a pain in the ass to develop for?

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But I can't help but feel like very low cost full-blown Linux devices are right around the corner.

why is that a but?

i don't think this is a case of, if we had waited longer we could have made them cheaper, but i rather believe that pine64, fairphone, and other projects going all the way back to openmoko were laying the groundwork that make the next generation of cheaper and better devices even possible.

so yes, very low cost full-blown Linux devices may very well be around the corner, but that's no reason to dismiss the pine64 products, on the contrary, they should be lauded for being pioneers

I'm not any kind of authority on this, but for the most part the hacker/OSS community is taking cheap chips and repurposing the hardware for other stuff. So progress in the space happens on its own. For instance the chip in the Lychee RV Nano is made for IP cameras. I guess my point is that once you can run Debian on your wrist (which will happen for external reasons), all these complex setups with customs RTOS stacks that people are working on may become kind of irrelevant. It's always a shame to see people's hard work become obsolete

You've made a very cool suspension for your carriage, but Ford is about to mass produce the automobile

i get your point, but i actually think that RTOS solutions will remain interesting as i believe they should be able to run on less power thus enabling uses that devices which need more power can't. (like a wrist watch that doesn't need to be recharged as often)

Yeah, totally could be :)

Total layman guess, but I think with an e-ink display you could get away with the chip sleeping most of the time

Battery size and battery time are the primary constraints for a wrist watch. The power efficiency of a SoC that runs full blown Debian, as well as Debian itself is much worse than the NRF52 used in PineTime. Without doing calculations, I would estimate 10-100x. With corresponding increase in battery size or decrease in battery time. That said, I believe there are smart watches that run Android on Linux, and they do manage 1 day of use.

A better development experience would be to use MicroPython. That will require a microcontroller with more RAM and FLASH space, but could equally power efficient. When using the LVGL UI library, and decent drivers for the peripherals on the device, and a live she'll connection, it is a very productive and pleasant developer experience.

The TTGO Watch S3 is an example of such hardware based on ESP32-S3 chip. Hardware is nice and cheap, but they have a hodgepodge custom SDK with forked MicroPython :/

As someone who’s worked on both embedded and Linux-based smartwatch firmware, yeah it’s mostly battery life. The nice part about developing for a lower power microcontroller is that you can basically aim to squeeze as much performance out of the chip as possible, and the power draw will still end up pretty good. On Linux devices, you need to an architecture early on for how you’re not going to blow your power budget immediately. Even stuff like entering/exiting suspend can be problematic in how many Joules it takes.

Battery life would be a major reason.

I agree with sibling comments that battery life would be the real issue here, but I was astonished to see the $9 price tag on this. Incredible.

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