Homebrew device with iPhone aspirations (based on an 8-bit AVR microcontroller) | Hacker News Reader

Homebrew device with iPhone aspirations (based on an 8-bit AVR microcontroller)

hackaday.com

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Schematics and software are available here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/microtouch/

Here's the author's blog post with more infos:

http://rossum.posterous.com/avr-homebrew-device-with-iphone-...

So it doesn't work as a phone? Yup, sounds like the iPhone. Zing!

Seriously though, it seems like it wouldn't be too difficult to hook in a GSM radio and make it into a true phone. Looks like there's a kit at SparkFun (using an ATMega chip, no less) that could be a starting point: http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i...

This looks like a pretty amazing accomplishment, I'm somewhat skeptical of it, especially since the source blog only has 2 posts on it. The technical details are fairly detailed, but I really want to get a look at the code and schematics.

Ok, I've done a quick skim of the schematics and code, and it certainly doesn't look like a hoax. I'd have to upgrade my opinion to 'pretty damn impressive!' Good work Peter!

Fascinating. But... would we call the aspirations "iPod Touch aspirations"? After all, there's no phone involved.

It's pretty crazy the grunt that some people can squeeze out of tiny, slow chips like that...

It occurred to me a few weeks ago that I could simulate a PC ISA bus using one of those "tiny, slow chips!" Yup, all those bags of old ISA bus peripherals I have in the closet could be run by one of these little CPUs.

Still never got used to the fact that the "tiny, slow chips" (I like that expression) littering my desktop are faster than the first three PC's I owned. Seriously, an AVR microcontroller I paid $2 for runs at 20MHz -- roughly the speed of a PC AT.

Yeah, we're definitely spoilt by yesterday's standards. I'm lucky in that while I'm young (24) I got into programming/computers early enough that I remember what it was like back in the Atari/Apple II/Mac Classic/286/386 days...

I still remember the day my Dad bought a Macintosh Centris 650. The best computer on the market at the time for use in sound mixing. 25Mhz of pure grunt. And it only cost a cool $10k!

Tiny, absolutely. But slow? not at all.

Today's software is slow and bloated. But the hardware in even the most meager of CPUs is incredible and can accomplish a lot. Desktop CPUs are what we call "overkill" except for CPU-bound applications (calculations). See your iPhone and all it can do? Even that is overkill.

There's nothing most people use their PC for that a $2 AVR cannot do (UI excluded, for that you'd obviously need an graphics card that can interface with an AVR). A good embedded software developer can write email, web, word processing, spreadsheet, games, etc. for an AVR with so much room to spare.

It's sad how the very sorry state of desktop software these days and the standards being set by the overly-bloated operating systems (don't confuse current OSes on the market with their kernel, please) has made us consider these modern miracles that take up less than half of your smallest nail and run at over 20 million cycles in a single second to be slow.

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