Precursor
www.crowdsupply.com
Mobile, Open Hardware, RISC-V System-on-Chip (SoC) Development Kit

Looks quite neat in terms of opsec, any thoughts on the matter?

  • SirLotsaLocks [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    This is pretty cool, it looks pretty nice too which isn't always the case with things like this.

  • Duo [any]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Cool I guess, but specs wise it's hard to see what you would use it for. By their own admission, it looks like it'll underperform mobile devices that are more than 15 years old now. And it doesn't actually have a cell connection, so you can't use it as a phone. Not really sure what the use case is here -- it seems about equivalent to carrying around a calculator and a notepad in a smaller form factor. It has wifi, but if you're somewhere with wifi, there should be no issue carrying around a laptop or whatever. Plus 500$ is pretty steep. Can anyone else figure this out?

    Edit: Ok it looks like you're really just supposed to use it for FPGA dev work, but I can find other FPGA dev kits that look like a raspberry pi rather than a phone for way cheaper. Still don't really get it.

    • the_river_cass [she/her]
      ·
      4 years ago

      it's a platform to build fully verified comms apps. think about a device you'd feel comfortable taking to an action and what guarantees you'd need in order to feel safe using it - this tries to provide those guarantees. I'm very excited about this project.

    • Ectrayn [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      It has wifi, but if you’re somewhere with wifi, there should be no issue carrying around a laptop or whatever.

      I think you are missing the point. You should consider your laptop to be a potential bug in your life (probably not as bad as your phone but eh). This looks like it is as close as proper opsec as you can achieve (since it is apparently significantly harder to temper with a FPGA than with a CPU), and they want to build a messaging platform on top of it (https://betrusted.io/). It's all open source, including the hardware, it's all "simple" (so humanly auditable) etc.

      And to be fair, it's about as powerfull as a nintendo DS, and a DS can already do a lot of things. So with well optimized code you can definitely write useful apps for it.

      • Cysioland [he/him,comrade/them]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Yeah, we forget that the modern software is quite bloated and that's why we need more and more RAM and CPU cores and gigahertz and shit. If you write your code right this device could perform fairly okay.

      • Duo [any]
        ·
        4 years ago

        You're right about all that, but if you're concerned about opsec to that level you shouldn't be using electronic devices at all, except I suppose for the cases where you have no other mode of communications with someone. That bestrusted.io project does look pretty interesting, though.

        • Ectrayn [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Well, I guess this kind of device + LoRa communication or some other sort of mesh network could be quite practical while still being unreasonably safe. And in the plan on the betrusted website they do mention their goal is to lower the cost to ~120usd (which is not nothing, for sure, but is more reasonable). These first batch is to found the development and allow them to work on betrusted.

          I agree the current price is outrageous but given the small number of units they would be producing for this first batch, I can't say I am surprised

          • the_river_cass [she/her]
            ·
            4 years ago

            Well, I guess this kind of device + LoRa communication or some other sort of mesh network could be quite practical while still being unreasonably safe.

            I was thinking the same thing. this is a much better platform for a lora-oriented secure comms platform than a throwaway android device or even many of the other SoCs I've been looking at. I appreciate the integrated keyboard and screen a lot as it removes the need to like, run full android or linux. if they publish full hardware schematics (they kind of have to for verifiability), the price will come down naturally as you'll be able to fab your own.

            so then that leaves a need for a secure comms app that can run over a lora mesh - something I'm actively working on. as this platform won't even ship its first version for a year, at which point I could begin development on it, I'm going to continue targeting android for the time being, but this is a great contender for a replacement once it's available.

            • Ectrayn [he/him]
              ·
              4 years ago

              All the schematics & source work are already public, see https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor#support-documentation and for example https://github.com/betrusted-io/betrusted-hardware

              • the_river_cass [she/her]
                ·
                4 years ago

                :shocked-pikachu:

                hell yeah! I backed but I may try and have one of these made sooner.