Subj : My Project: BBS Bridge To : All From : calcmandan Date : Fri Jan 28 2022 23:58:06 Hi folks. This is going to be a long-winded post so bear with me. I've hired an engineer to assist in the design of an IoT device for the purpose of connecting to BBS land. What's this, you say? Well, some background is in order. I use an android tablet for most of my 'away-from-home' bbs'ing. Virtual keyboards suck worse than anything-made-by-apple. At home, I use my computer. Fine.. One day I was watching a ben heck video on youtube and he brought up the arduboy while discussing a project. Instantly fascinated, I got my hands on one. Sure it's fun and all. The games are okay, for 8-bit computing. I was more fascinated with the expanded abilities some people managed to get. One person created a pseudo GUI that mimic's a classic mac OS and using the arrow keys to move the mouse cursor. Some created terminal software. There's a wide range of applications written for that small thing. That inspired an idea of utilizing the arduino platform to bbs instead of game. Using a larger color screen and a keyboard comfortable for thumb typing, I started listing requirements. Spoke to a few people on MRC and got some input. I meet with the engineer tomorrow to finalize the requirements and he'll start designing. I've done some searching and clearly much software is already written for the arduino platform, like a terminal emulator suitable for telnet/ssh connections. It'll need to be adapted to render cp437. There is other stuff on my wish list of course. Vision: Powering on the device, it launches a loading screen from ROM. Flipping side to side gives the user categories. Up/Down displays different apps. Pressing enter launches the app. The qwerty keyboard will make navigation, messaging, chatting easy. NTP upon network connection will fetch date/time. Data will be displayed along the top. Files downloaded from FDNs can be transferred via USB- Type-C, bluetooth, or via infrared. No OS/Runtime. Hardware, once finalized, will be open. Software will be open source. All menus and menus will be text-mode. To speed development, I will be hiring a coder to do the bulk of the programming for me. For smaller projects, I'll be doing the development or tweaking existing software to fit my vision. If I can get a community behind the project, I can launch a BBS to serve as a repository for software designed for the device as well as message boards. Now that I have an engineer identified and committed, I will be launching a github soon. He will need roughly a month to design the pcb and provide a BOM. I will be 3d printing the frame/chassis where necessary. In the meantime, I plan on standing up a new BBS that'll work as a home base for the project. Part of the vision includes a homebase BBS that will Question: would anyone be interested in owning such a device? Perhaps assist in contributing code or modules for the project? If I can get interest, I will provide a wish list of software Daniel Traechin .... I think I am, therefore, I am... I think. --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/13 (Linux/64) * Origin: thE qUAntUm wOrmhOlE, rAmsgAtE, uK. bbs.erb.pw (1337:1/101) .