more generally, collapseos is cosplay, not engineering
in more detail, collapseos is not a pragmatic engineering effort to foster resiliency, but an essentially religious effort to atone for the sins of the worldly through ascetic renunciation of pleasures such as guis, returning to an imagined arcadian past of austere virtue
see against-collapseos.md in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/pavnotes2.git for the full critique
I agree with some of it in modified form, such as pointing out that far more powerful systems like old Android phones are sitting around in great quantity and would be a useful scavenge for a complete CollapseOS. In fact that seems to be what DuskOS is about, I'll be interested in your take on that once you have one.
But those are not microcontrollers, and what microcontrollers do can't be replaced by sticking a JTAG on an abandoned Android and calling it a day. Your take on the availability for scavenge of 6502s is simply incorrect, Western Digital, who should know, says annual production is in the hundreds of millions, joining the estimated 5 to 10 billion which already exist. https://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/
It strikes me as a quixotic, but worthwhile, investment in civilizational insurance. I don't disagree about the motive at all, but it seems like a useful outlet for that sort of angst. If he keeps at it long enough I would hope he'll support a few more chips, and that seems likely, as I remember a time when it was Z80 only. Variants on that chip exist in their billions as well, although the original was taken off the market, hmm. This April.
looking on digikey i can't find any 6502 or 65c02 parts, although there are a couple of sbcs like https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/olimex-ltd/NEO650.... digikey of course doesn't have everything, but they're usually an okay indicator of what is popular
i agree that android phones cannot substitute for microcontrollers! their cortex-a cpus can't guarantee hard real-time responsiveness. and i agree with virgil's point that microcontrollers are very important for practical everyday things. and 6502s make perfectly good microcontrollers, albeit more power-hungry than designs fabbed in a smaller feature size, and requiring external memory
while the z80 itself is no longer made, plenty of clones of it are, and a z80 is also perfectly fine as a microcontroller, and a 6502 or z80 is close to the smallest machine on which a self-hosting development environment is feasible
They were also quite widespread in LCD games, the Tamagotchi used one, Furby, later-model Tiger handhelds, that sort of thing. There are a great many product numbers and variations, because it was widely licensed. Keyboards, computer mice, lots of things.
Digikey has the W65C02SXB, the NEO6502, the W65C02S, and I'm sure there are more in there somewhere. In a scavenge scenario, just figuring out what speaks the ISA would be challenging, but I'm picturing our plucky heroes getting the hang of it after awhile. And of course a Forth like in CollapseOS has an advantage in that adding words to take advantage of extended instructions is practical.
It looks like the project is converging on "OS that runs on comfortable hardware, which can serve as a hub for and talk to the microcontrollers which join the baling wire in holding remnant technology together" which is a more interesting vision of the future, although just as grimdark as it ever was.
> WDC has licensed our 65xx technology to a number of companies over our long history including MOS Tech, Rockwell, GTE, CMD and many others.
rockwell, mos technologies, and cmd don't exist since 02001, gte since 02000. i suspect this page hasn't been updated in quite a while, maybe since last millennium, and possibly if they were ever making hundreds of millions per year they aren't now. https://wdc65xx.com/where-to-buy has been updated and has their current stock numbers, which total under 31000 for all their microcontrollers and microprocessors, which would be 8 hours of stock if they were making a hundred million per year. a hundred thousand seems more plausible
mouser has another 4000 or so in stock, again summing all the different skus. by comparison they have 38000 attiny13a-ssur chips https://ar.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Microchip-Technology/ATT..., 22000 atsamd20e16b-mut chips https://ar.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Microchip-Technology/ATS..., 28000 pic18f46k42-i/pt chips https://ar.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Microchip-Technology/PIC..., almost 63000 stm32f030f4p6tr chips https://ar.mouser.com/ProductDetail/STMicroelectronics/STM32...
digi-key doesn't actually have the w65c02sxb, which is an eval board. that's a 'marketplace product' meaning that digi-key just sends your order to another seller, in this case wdc. they do have 5 units of the w65c02s and 17 units of the neo6502, which are eval boards from olimex. no bare chips
as for the furby, it used the spc81a, a 6502 clone that lacks the y register. more importantly, though, the spc81a is evidently mask-programmed and lacks any apparent way to get it to use external memory. so it's probably useless as a microcontroller to scavenge. the same can be said of keyboard and mouse controllers: although conceivably they might use a 6502 instruction set, they aren't of any use if you can't reprogram them
i can't find any information on tiger electronics handheld games hardware, but given that they designed the furby, i suspect the story will be the same there: game in rom, not enough pins for a memory bus (though you can use the spc81a's i/o ports to control an external bit-serial memory; the datasheet suggests an spi ram)
as for traffic lights, the last traffic light controller i saw open was electromechanical, no visible electronics beyond diodes, so i don't think you're going to be salvaging very many microcontrollers from traffic light controllers; there are too few per population and their replacement lifetime is too long
a vision i think is a lot more appealing is self-sufficient microcontrollers. cp/m was perfectly capable of self-hosting, although dec machines gave it its initial bootstrap. a 4-megahertz z80 was perfectly adequate for assembling the bios, bdos, and command processor, despite having only something like 0.5 8-bit mips and 0.05 dhrystone mips (https://netlib.org/performance/html/dhrystone.data.col0.html), with 64 kibibytes of ram or even less, and only a 90-kibibyte floppy or two for mass storage. bds c provided a reasonable facsimile of a c compiler that would run on cp/m
contrast that to things like the atsamd20e16b microcontroller i mentioned above: a 32-bit cortex-m0+ running at 48 megahertz and about 60 dhrystone mips, 64 kibibytes of in-application-programmable nor flash, and 8 kibibytes of sram, whose spi interface can control a microsd card with gigabytes or even a terabyte of nonvolatile memory, accessible not at kilobytes per second but megabytes per second, with access latencies measured not in seconds but microseconds. it supposedly uses 50 microamps per megahertz; at 1.8 volts that would be 90 picojoules per clock cycle and so about 100 picojoules per instruction. running on a milliwatt it would still provide you 10 million instructions per second. mouser will sell them to you for two bucks fifty. or lcsc will sell you a cypress cy8c4045fni-ds400t for 1.5¢: https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/Microcontrollers-MCU-MPU... which is also a 48-megahertz 32-bit arm but with a tiny amount of ram
these seem like the kind of thing you'd want to be using if you're concerned about sustaining the ability to program microcontrollers in the face of societal collapse
with respect to duskos, i've been reading through their documentation and it doesn't seem like an unreasonable approach. possibly the wrong approach but it does seem like they're considering engineering tradeoffs rather than cosplaying steve wozniak
Talk about the end of an era.-
DuskOS doesn’t run on z80. It’s i386 or ARM. Whether that makes it a serious effort or not is still up for debate.
i've added a header to that effect since it seems to have been confusing people
there are other advantages as well. if someone clones the git repo, they'll still be able to read it after i die and my site goes down; and there's no incentive for anyone to pressure me to rewrite history by deleting things from it, which is a thing that has happened to me in the past, since i can't delete them from remote clones
I'm curious because I buy this comment more than their mission statement, although I absolutely agree with their stance on the "longevity/maintainability problem" in software and hardware.
but as soon as I saw the ranting about colonialism I was like "oh... basically, anarchist anti-capitalists"
as soon as they have kids, they will quickly abandon their non-acquisition of resources stance, LOL
collapseos isn't a 100r thing, and i haven't seen anything from virgil that sounds like an anarchist anti-capitalist. i have a lot of sympathies for the anarchist anti-capitalist point of view although personally i've suffered a lot more harm from anti-capitalism than from capitalism
The funny thing about having a kid (he's 3) is that you are forced to re-evaluate all your values and preconceived notions to see what it is you really want to transmit to your kid.