CL-32 is a DIY pocket computer with a thumb keyboard, E-Ink and ESP32-S3 chip

liliputing.com

25 points·philips··5 comments

It's semi wild to me that esp32-s3 isn't really that much of a core upgrade over esp8266, a 10 year old core.

In the aughts I would have sworn we were in this massive upswing, that mobile chips were going to keep getting better and better. But it feels like this last decade has been significant value adds but also a lot of entrenchment.

It and been pretty awesome seeing some of the new higher-tier/application-processor arm chips launching on 16nm or 12nm. Most are still decade old or almost cores, but at least they are somewhat modern wrt power and graphics (not that we have drivers yet, but good news from PanVK just the past couple days; half a decade ago we had nothing for no one drivers wise).

I have some hopes. It's cool seeing Pi Pico almost able to hack 480 mbit usb2. We are starting to see the long slumbering throughput-monster fpga world making new things; cool affordable parts from Lattice & Efinix with nice transceivers). RISC-V is an unknown now but will hopefully start pushing up some; Pico hopefully helps there.

It's a 2-3x performance improvement according to don't benchmarks (https://github.com/nopnop2002/esp-idf-benchmark) but in general think it's more that espressif aren't trying to be the highest performing CPU cores. They're trying to be efficient in cost and power.

I'd buy one. It'll never be a good "daily driver" just because of input devices alone, but it seems like a fun little low distractions "electronic note pad" to use when out and about.

I really wish that someone took another crack at the Beepy form factor with a pi zero, all the new iterations seem to use an esp32.

That keyboard looks like an interesting choice

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