This is kinda an unorganized post, so sorry for that.
Recently, I've been thinking about creating a computer in the form factor of the "Handheld PCs" that were around during the 1990s. It's mainly just for me but I wouldn't mind selling a few to the small community of nerds who like those things. I'm trying to avoid making another PC or ARM device like someone would normally do just because I'm not really a fan of either of those architectures or the monopoly they represent.
I've been considering the MIPS-compatible X2000 from the Chinese semiconductor firm Ingenic but unfortunately that chip doesn't have an external memory controller so you're limited to just the 128M/256M of DRAM in the package which is less than ideal.
So, has anyone heard of any weird chips lately? Idk where else to ask. I don't know where people who make computers discuss things like this.
(Btw if you're interested in this topic you may enjoy www.greenarraychips.com. It's Charles H. Moore's outfit, the guy who invented Forth. They make cute little chips with many independent stack machines on them. Not useful for this project but still pretty cool. This is not an ad, I just like weird computers.)
Why not something RISC-V? There are some pretty robust SBCs now that could be bolted into a screen and keyboard.
I'm looking to design my own board. I'd use a RISC-V chip but they seem to be impossible to find through the usual electronics distributors. I might email SiFive or one of the other vendors but I suspect I won't be able to acquire just a few chips cheaply...
I wonder if some of that is because a lot of the RISC-V SBC products I've seen are Chinese designs-- maybe they're not as widely available in the Western supply chains.
The Usual Sources (Mouser or Digikey) don't stock my favourite RISC-V MCU (WCH CH32V30x), but you can buy them all day long on AliExpress.
I wonder if SexyCyborg would have any ideas. She's the most cyberpunk human being on the planet, if anyone would know where to get unusual chips in China she would.
Oh I had never heard of that vendor! I'll have to check them out. I've been looking at AliExpress on and off but it's really hard to find stuff unless you know exactly what you want.
There's some nice designs in China that seem impossible to get in the West. Would love to check out some of Loongson's offerings or something like that. There's also a line of Russian microprocessors called "Elbrus" that have a very interesting VLIW architecture. But that's definitely impossible to get now with the sanctions.
I guess neither of those would be suitable for a portable device anyway lol. Maybe I'll just deal with it and get some cheap widely available ARM stuff.
this probably isnt what you want but the pinephone pro+keyboard accessory is a pretty neat little linux handheld (if very janky in some ways)
or the original pinephone is probably fine if you're mostly going to stay in a terminal
I have one of those! I like it but it just doesn't have the same feel as a Jornada or something lol
The battery life is atrocious too. The RK3399 and ARM are also pretty janky on their own tbh. Especially boot-up...
Isn't this beautiful?
Show
the part where it's running windows not so much but it's a better kb layout for sure
The ppp is growing on me, especially since suspend and camera and shit work now but it is still janky (mine tried to melt a pogo pin
) and the battery life is atrocious yeah (though not bad with the keyboard's 6000mAh!!). It may end up being a bridge for me that leads to not having a smartphone at all though lol.Honestly I don't mind the boot-up, tow-boot with built in jump drive is nice, and once its in linux I don't have to care.
There's an aftermarket battery claiming 3500mAh that does anecdotally feel like it's actually a bit better than stock (and a lot better than the shitty offbrands I've bought before)
For me it's just a matter of something that actually works tho, I don't have nearly the time to build my own shit with custom chips on an architecture with even less support than aarch64. I'm already putting a lot into getting shit to work on mobile linux ARM
the part where it's running windows not so much but it's a better kb layout for sure
Yeahh lol they shipped with Windows CE. The cool thing is most of these have Linux or NetBSD ports!
The ppp is growing on me, especially since suspend and camera and shit work now but it is still janky (mine tried to melt a pogo pin ) and the battery life is atrocious yeah (though not bad with the keyboard's 6000mAh!!). It may end up being a bridge for me that leads to not having a smartphone at all though lol.
Yeah I'm so glad they fixed the suspend. That really made the difference with it being usable or not. Sorry to hear about your pogo pin. One of my sim card holder pins broke off but I managed to shim it with a piece of tin foil lol. One of my other problems with hardware like this is that it's so easy to break ;w;
Honestly I don't mind the boot-up, tow-boot with built in jump drive is nice, and once its in linux I don't have to care.
I just meant that the de facto standard for bringing up ARM machines is U-boot... which I hate dealing with. I just wish we had Open Firmware (IEEE 1275) everywhere rather than UEFI or U-boot tbh. Tow-boot is at least simple for the end user.
For me it's just a matter of something that actually works tho, I don't have nearly the time to build my own shit with custom chips on an architecture with even less support than aarch64. I'm already putting a lot into getting shit to work on mobile linux ARM
Oh of course, I just like hacking on hardware lol. I really dislike how PINE64 has taken such a hands-off approach with their hardware. It took years for the PPP to even get to this mildly-usable point. If I ever complete my hardware I'm gonna port the software it needs personally. Probably Plan 9 and NetBSD. (Linux is a mess all of its own...)
Partly inspired by this comment I actually fixed my melty pogo pin so I could switch back to using the keyboard! It wasn't bad. I already had the pine64 replacement pins that are supposed to be a bit better, and thankfully the hole for the pin wasn't totally destroyed like the ones I've seen pictures of online, so I just gave it a nudge with a soldering iron and it settled back into its proper position/angle.
Agreed on pine64's approach. I'm fine if they don't want to be a software company but they need to just pay some kernel developers to get hardware support done and mainlined quickly for new devices if they want them to succeed. Their model almost kinda worked for the OG pinephone, there was enough buzz and development effort to get it to a usable state, but starting over all that work from scratch for every new device with little to no investment from the company that's actually collecting the money for these things is so demoralizing. the pinephone/tab/book all just rely on one guy in czechia for the kernel support who is just hoping that if he doesn't release his source some company will contract him to do similar work for their products. and the distro situation isn't better, pretty sure the "official" ish distro for the pinetab 2 is danctnix which is just run by one very busy weeb hobbyist as far as I can tell lol
But yeah honestly low level software and hardware stuff is mostly over my head. it's cool though, I try to always check it out when I get a chance. What do you even do on a plan 9 system? seems like it'd be hard to do anything resembling the modern web or run most applications on a system that obscure. but I also know next to nothing about it
Partly inspired by this comment I actually fixed my melty pogo pin so I could switch back to using the keyboard!It wasn't bad. I already had the pine64 replacement pins that are supposed to be a bit better, and thankfully the hole for the pin wasn't totally destroyed like the ones I've seen pictures of online, so I just gave it a nudge with a soldering iron and it settled back into its proper position/angle.
Glad you got it fixed!
Agreed on pine64's approach. I'm fine if they don't want to be a software company but they need to just pay some kernel developers to get hardware support done and mainlined quickly for new devices if they want them to succeed. Their model almost kinda worked for the OG pinephone, there was enough buzz and development effort to get it to a usable state, but starting over all that work from scratch for every new device with little to no investment from the company that's actually collecting the money for these things is so demoralizing. the pinephone/tab/book all just rely on one guy in czechia for the kernel support who is just hoping that if he doesn't release his source some company will contract him to do similar work for their products.
Yeahh fr
What's up with the kernel from the guy in Czechia? I knew most of the distros aren't shipping mainline kernels but it's so hard to find info online on this topic lol.
and the distro situation isn't better, pretty sure the "official" ish distro for the pinetab 2 is danctnix which is just run by one very busy weeb hobbyist as far as I can tell lol
lol. Yeahh, even the official distro for most of the other Pine hardware is the most
-pilled and mismanaged Linux project out there relative to how popular it is (Manjaro).But yeah honestly low level software and hardware stuff is mostly over my head. it's cool though, I try to always check it out when I get a chance. What do you even do on a plan 9 system? seems like it'd be hard to do anything resembling the modern web or run most applications on a system that obscure. but I also know next to nothing about it
Yeah, stuff like the web requires infrastructure like web browsers that is not very portable and on the order of millions of lines of code in size. A web browser is basically like an operating system of its own these days. That being said there is a Netsurf port to 9front and virtualization support on PCs in 9front (so you can run Linux). It's a very different system and radically simpler than modern Unix or Windows. But it was designed by the people who made Unix with modern networking in mind and with the knowledge that everyone has a computer now (the word everyone used loosely). A lot of people (including me) just find it very easy and pleasing to write software for and use. You can accomplish a lot more with a lot less code. It's extremely portable too, which makes it appealing as an official OS for a new hardware platform.
megi is the name of the kernel dev from czechia. He's put in a lot of work and he's pretty active in the matrix chats, but he's not big on upstreaming his changes and some of his side projects he doesn't even release the code... this seems like a good summary https://momi.ca/posts/2022-09-07-mainline.html
I think he might be doing a bit of "making himself necessary" in the ecosystem of A64 based devices tbh, You can't entirely blame him but its bad for the community long term.
Manjaro is a mess though yeah, I used it for a while since it came on the pinebook/pinephone but I had to nope out.
Plan9 is pretty befuddling still ngl but I'm starting to like what I see. I might have to install it on a raspberry pi and see what the fuss is about
megi is the name of the kernel dev from czechia. He's put in a lot of work and he's pretty active in the matrix chats, but he's not big on upstreaming his changes and some of his side projects he doesn't even release the code... this seems like a good summary https://momi.ca/posts/2022-09-07-mainline.html
I think he might be doing a bit of "making himself necessary" in the ecosystem of A64 based devices tbh, You can't entirely blame him but its bad for the community long term.
Thanks for the article! That 500k line diff from mainline is scary...
Plan9 is pretty befuddling still ngl but I'm starting to like what I see. I might have to install it on a raspberry pi and see what the fuss is about
Highly recommend this video to help you get around the UI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt3Dr3jUPjo
Hope you have fun if you decide to try!
i've been thinking about something similar (my notes is here, but its only a partial spec). i've been collecting softcores for whenever i decide to revive the hardware project. i have a bunch of junk computers that i need to do something with first lol granted my approach is a little funky, since i kinda want everything to be a softcore.
Cool project! And I love your mothra-compatible website too lol.
I really appreciate seeing unorthodox hardware projects and ways of computing, especially more sustainable ways.
