[HN Gopher] Lisp-powered laptop with a battery life measured in ...
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Lisp-powered laptop with a battery life measured in years
Author : shkhuz
Score : 135 points
Date : 2023-03-08 20:21 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hackster.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hackster.io)
| bsaul wrote:
| i really believe one of the most fundamental task for human
| specie now is to create some kind of backup for all the knowledge
| of human civilisation. A book you can always open and read, but
| how are you going to ensure wikipedia remains accessible in case
| of a true collapse ?
| rollcat wrote:
| This is the exact topic of Isaac Asimov's "Foundation". (I've
| watched the series, now digging into the first book.)
|
| Wikipedia provides downloadable data dumps, I guess that's one
| way to start.
|
| You may also want to check out http://collapseos.org/.
| johnea wrote:
| Does it come with one of those magnefying glasses in front of the
| screen?
|
| You know, like in the moview Brazil?
| initramfs wrote:
| I wrote a dystopian post on this technology- I also write on a
| similar project idea: https://iotmote.substack.com/p/remaking-
| the-nokia-6110-and-p... https://hackaday.io/project/177716-the-
| libre-autarkic-laptop
| tomcam wrote:
| Yes. And a drab uniform is provided with each machine sold at
| Best Buy
| sieste wrote:
| has anyone ever tried to harvest energy from key presses to
| prolong battery life?
|
| on that one, a little capacitor in the parenthesis keys would
| probably make that solar panel unnecessary.
| reerdna wrote:
| Yeah, it is used in https://www.freethegameboy.info for one -
| not sure if they published numbers on how much energy it
| produced.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| Those switches look like they are the mini generators from ZF
| Electronics that produce 0.33 mWs of power per activation.
|
| ZF Electronics used to be called Cherry Industrial, which was
| until a few years ago part of the same company as Cherry AG
| who make the famous keyboard switches.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Yes, specifically ZF AFIG-0007 energy harvesting switch
|
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3411839 p. 12
|
| https://eu.mouser.com/ProductDetail/ZF/AFIG-0007
| msk-lywenn wrote:
| I dream of a DMG-1000, an original gameboy with a thousand
| hours battery life because it would have a CPU made with
| modern technology. This is actually DMG-Infinite! Amazing.
| Thanks for sharing.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I think I'd prefer a good solid crank to having to grind a
| keyboard. I remember manual typewriters - they were a hideous,
| miserable experience.
| snozolli wrote:
| Pedal power, like an old-timey sewing machine.
| digitallyfree wrote:
| A hand crank would be really cool on such a device. Rather
| than scramble for a charger and outlet you could just take a
| break and crank away.
| reerdna wrote:
| I've considered adding a few small geared stepper motors as a
| combination input device (scroll wheel, or two for etch-a-
| sketch cursor control) and energy harvester.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| At $10 a piece and ~90-key keyboard you can have chargable
| batteries for years.
|
| https://eu.mouser.com/ProductDetail/ZF/AFIG-0007
|
| > on that one, a little capacitor in the parenthesis keys would
| probably make that solar panel unnecessary.
|
| ... ye, you probably can get it with $20 only.
| sparkie wrote:
| It's a slight exaggeration how frequent parens are used in
| Lisp. The keys tab, space, shift, backspace, hyphen enter are
| probably used more often, and many alphanumeric keys.
|
| Perhaps you could have the whole keyboard floating on a lever
| like a see-saw, with one of these switches beneath it at the
| right and left side of the pivot. That way any key press off-
| center would activate one of the two switches. No need for a
| switch per key. The keyboard would have a slight wobble, but
| it might not be very noticeable if the distance from center
| is ~10cm and the switch activation is only a few mm. Keys
| closest to the sides would have a greater probability of
| activating the switches.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| Wonderful work! What kind of modifications did you make to ulisp
| to create potatOS? And how is it working with ulisp? My only real
| lisp experience is with CL.
| reerdna wrote:
| Thank you! Not too much really. I "ported" it to the SparkFun
| arduino core - which mostly involved adding some ifdefs and
| fixing a few bugs, like this one
| https://github.com/sparkfun/Arduino_Apollo3/issues/478 , and
| added the adafruit sharp memory display library which
| integrated quite well with the existing graphics support. Then
| I wrote an interrupt routine to scan the keyboard.
|
| I also had to add some error handling patches which someone had
| shared in the ulisp forum (because you don't want the REPL to
| crash if you have a typo)
|
| Working with uLisp is fun - it's not super fast and it does
| have a few limitations and gotchas, but it was by far the
| easiest option for this project as so much was already
| supported. And the documentation and community is very nice.
| brenainn wrote:
| A great way to resurrect the argument about ideal line length.
| turtlebits wrote:
| Having a solar panel defeats the metric of "battery life measured
| in years".
|
| More useful would be runtime of the system on battery (which I'm
| guessing doesn't make a great headline) as well as the output
| wattage of the built in solar panel.
| serf wrote:
| > Having a solar panel defeats the metric of "battery life
| measured in years".
|
| eh, I don't see why. Solar pocket calculators were still sold
| with the understanding that their function and lifespan hinged
| upon the chemistry of the internal battery.
|
| it's not like these things can function without some form of
| capacitance, and getting that to last a long time is tricky.
| pengaru wrote:
| It's impressive to dig a long forgotten solar calculator from
| the late 70s out of a drawer, and have it still function
| perfectly.
|
| It seems like a monumental failure of the computer industry
| that we still don't have the equivalent in laptop form. None
| of my portable computers will come out of a forgotten drawer
| 50+ years from now and readily turn on.
| cduzz wrote:
| A while back I wanted to run OS/2 on real hardware -- I
| bought an old HP omnibook 800; the batteries were all shot
| but otherwise it worked fine (the laptop; OS/2 was kind of
| a pain to setup). That's not the 70s but it's old. Lots of
| that vintage computer would work fine if it weren't for
| those pesky capacitors -- the same's true of lots of older
| vintage electronics.
|
| I recently bought an old keyboard (an old IBM M4-1, a PS2
| keyboard / trackpoint combination thing) -- it's from 1994
| and needed a couple adapters, but connected to my macbook
| pro just fine, and worked pretty well.
|
| OS2 won't know modern TLS and the keyboard doesn't have the
| command / meta / windows / open clover shift keys, they do
| fine.
|
| My old HP calculator from high school didn't work when I
| tried it out...
| wkjagt wrote:
| I guess the battery acts more like a buffer for the solar
| panel, and battery life here literally means "the lifetime of
| the battery".
| reerdna wrote:
| 12000 mAh battery / ~2 mA power consumption when running code
| and updating the display every second = 250 days. Still pretty
| good? Haven't had a chance to do much testing of the solar
| panel yet, but it does charge while running in good light so
| it's > 1mA.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| 2 milliamps? Preposterous
|
| Here's the datasheet for your (or a similar) display (PDF) ht
| tps://media.digikey.com/pdf/Data%20Sheets/Sharp%20PDFs/LS0...
|
| ..250 uW average power consumption on your display panel..
| well, maybe that's not so preposterous after all, great work
| a9h74j wrote:
| I've imagined having an OLED screen which only flashes on
| momentarily. Could be used for writing without editing.
| [deleted]
| Aloha wrote:
| I've imagined like an OLED/ePaper hybrid for that application.
| 404mm wrote:
| Or e-ink display. Unfortunately those are quite pricey compared
| to LCD
| reerdna wrote:
| Hey HN! This is my project. Hope you find it interesting. AMA.
| upghost wrote:
| Hell yeah that's some next level lisp hacking! Great work.
| reerdna wrote:
| Thanks! Have not had the chance to do too much lisp hacking
| yet though, I still very much consider myself a beginner.
| Mostly solder and C so far, apart from implementing a crude
| text editor.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| keithwinstein wrote:
| This is awesome! This kind of extreme low-power application was
| the original reason I wanted Mosh -- I always thought it would
| be awesome to have a wireless (hand-cranked?) laptop that could
| run SSH and would only consume energy when (a) a key was
| pressed [to update the locally generated UI], or (b) it wanted
| to fire up the radio (on its chosen schedule, e.g. <1 Hz) to
| retrieve an update from the server of the "ground truth" UI and
| reconcile that with the local prediction.
| reerdna wrote:
| Thank you! Mosh is great, I have found it very helpful at
| times in my day job. SSHing into servers in Australia from
| Norway, the latency was pretty bad.
|
| Have not started working on wireless yet but I hope to get to
| it. The SoC i use has Bluetooth. Using it for a remote shell
| would be amazing.
| maxk42 wrote:
| Hi there! Neat project! Can you give us a rundown of some of
| its features? Which processor are you using? Do you intend to
| sell these or are you only creating a prototype?
| reerdna wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| Not many features of note - it runs arbitrary lisp code, has
| a simple graphics interface. You can save and load code and
| data/text files to SD card.
|
| The processor is the Ambiq Apollo3 Blue, which is really what
| makes running arbitrary code with such low power consumption
| possible. 48/96MHz, 384k of RAM.
| https://ambiq.com/apollo3-blue/
|
| There's an Apollo4 which is faster and has way more memory,
| but it's a tiny BGA chip which doesn't have an Arduino core
| and I don't have the skills to work with that (yet ...)
|
| I hope to create a PCB for it at least, it would make the
| device tiny and sleek and make it a lot easier for others to
| reproduce. But I haven't been able to learn PCB design yet.
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(page generated 2023-03-08 23:00 UTC)