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Paul MaudDib posted:I think there's a lot of utility to a text-only terminal that lives forever on a couple AAs. Lately I've been thinking about trying to combine a Kindle epaper as a display driven by a Pi (see Kindleberry) or an ATmega and a LoNet board or something. Man I'd love to have something like that ran a stripped down Linux CLI that I could SSH/Telnet into stuff with. Small, lightweight and ran forever on battery power. The only problem would be the wireless chipset since those drink power like there is no tomorrow. I would like to have something that had a 24 hour use and several week standby battery life. It would be great to just put in a kit bag and bring with you for things that don't require a entire real computer. I have tried to use a mobile phone or iPad/tablet for that use for awhile but it is still more than what I need and I still need to bring a keyboard with me at least.
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Aug 10, 2015 07:11
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Djarum posted:Man I'd love to have something like that ran a stripped down Linux CLI that I could SSH/Telnet into stuff with. Small, lightweight and ran forever on battery power. The only problem would be the wireless chipset since those drink power like there is no tomorrow. I would like to have something that had a 24 hour use and several week standby battery life. It would be great to just put in a kit bag and bring with you for things that don't require a entire real computer. I have tried to use a mobile phone or iPad/tablet for that use for awhile but it is still more than what I need and I still need to bring a keyboard with me at least. Couldn't you do this with a Pi, a small screen, and a bunch of batteries?
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Aug 11, 2015 04:12
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Variable 5 posted:Couldn't you do this with a Pi, a small screen, and a bunch of batteries? Yes, it's just inefficient. The Pi's processor actually runs at about 3V, it takes 5V and then uses a linear regulator (very inefficient, burning off x% of your voltage directly burns off an equivalent amount of current in heat) to drop it back down. You can supposedly drive it with lower voltage but my experience is that they're very sensitive to power supply problems, so you're running a second regulator to feed it. It pulls at least 2 watts and up to 5 watts, so at 5V you're talking 0.4 to 1A. The TFT screens typically pull another 100-200mA. An alkaline provides about 2000-2500 mAH between 1.5V and 0.8V cutoff. So assuming you drive it with at least 7 AAs you should be looking at something like 10 hours ballpark. In comparison a PicoPower AVR can be driven down to 1.8V and can be clocked down arbitrarily low from a baseline of 1ma/MHz (0.4ma at 1Mhz@1.8v). Some of them actually run down to 0.7v with an internal boost regulator. eInk displays only draw current while they're re-drawing the screen (about 2ma@3v for a 2" screen, for like a quarter second or something). If you drive the AVR at 1MHz@3.3V from the internal oscillator they take about 0.7 mA, so let's say with a bigger screen you draw 5mA all up, you're getting 2000mAH/5mA=400 hours from 2xAAs. Not including any connectivity, keyboard, etc of course. Rig up some poo poo with Bluetooth LE and it'll work, it'll do text editing and terminal poo poo fine. It's a TRS-80/100 replacement, the M100 had a loving 8085 with 256B of SRAM, 4K of SRAM should be enough for anybody. Buffer poo poo in SRAM, let the BT/LE hit your actual computer every 30 seconds, code in vi, and compile on your sick mainframe. The 80s live on. Bet you could do 50 hours off 4xAA with a regulator, including wifi and keyboard. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 05:31 on Aug 11, 2015 |
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Aug 11, 2015 04:42
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Variable 5 posted:Couldn't you do this with a Pi, a small screen, and a bunch of batteries? Problem is that a Pi takes up far too much power. I would want something that sips so little power that it will last forever, also without being very big. Something like the first gen Kindle but more stripped down would be what I'd like to see; a built in keyboard, nothing fancy at all, give it a ethernet and a couple USB ports for connecting a keyboard or serial adaptor. I like function and simplicity. Like I said the biggest problem would be wireless since no one has a ultra low power wireless chipset out that is worth a poo poo. I have had friends looking into them for various projects in the last couple of years and they all are garbage for one reason or another, mostly because they chew power like it is going out of style. Power consumption is a big deal when you are going from something that you want to have going for days to weeks.
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Aug 11, 2015 04:57
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Djarum posted:Like I said the biggest problem would be wireless since no one has a ultra low power wireless chipset out that is worth a poo poo. I have had friends looking into them for various projects in the last couple of years and they all are garbage for one reason or another, mostly because they chew power like it is going out of style. Power consumption is a big deal when you are going from something that you want to have going for days to weeks. Well, fundamentally you're not going to escape Shannon-Hartley. Transmitting information costs power, it's a question of how you deliver that energy. Narrowband means it goes farther (better SNR) but your bitrate shits itself. Wideband, sure download that AVI, but it'll cost you right in the power budget. The way I see it there's not that much information to send between a text terminal. You store the text in SRAM, you buffer the changes, and periodically you send them down the wire for storage on the mainframe. How many bytes of text can you change in a 30 second interval? More or less than a 2KB change buffer? Do you have more than 32KB of source+program size with some simple-ish compression algorithm? (source compacts like crazy, lookit all them keywords). It's not quite that easy given the existence of server-to-terminal messages, or "I want to load the non-buffered 32KB of program source", but you can define a couple brief transciever windows that shouldn't drift too far during a reasonable (tens of seconds) resync interval. And maybe during compile time you can have the server periodically give an ETA so you don't nail the receive current. But like - hasn't someone hammered this poo poo out during the VT100 days? Hello retro thread, please advise me on archaic terminal protocols. Assuming you can sleep a lot of the time, BTLE 4.0 is actually very reasonable on the power budget. Maybe you could do even better with Zigbee Pro's fancy gently caress-the-defaults mode and using a crazy amount of ECC to trade your bitrate into better signal quality or something. Pretty high frequency though. All things equal, lower frequency usually goes farther, so 2.4Ghz is actually not ideal. But depending on range you're talking like 10-80 mA at 3V during the transmit windows, and ~15-35 during the receive windows. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 05:20 on Aug 11, 2015 |
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Aug 11, 2015 05:09
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Paul MaudDib posted:Well, fundamentally you're not going to escape Shannon-Hartley. Transmitting information costs power, it's a question of how you deliver that energy. Narrowband means it goes farther (better SNR) but your bitrate shits itself. Wideband, sure download that AVI, but it'll cost you right in the power budget. Well for my needs I would need 802.11 instead of BT by itself. If I could somehow get away with just Bluetooth I would and you can get pretty good power consumption from BTLE. Sadly I am not enough of a engineer to be able to properly put together what I would want.
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Aug 11, 2015 05:20
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Djarum posted:Well for my needs I would need 802.11 instead of BT by itself. If I could somehow get away with just Bluetooth I would and you can get pretty good power consumption from BTLE. Sadly I am not enough of a engineer to be able to properly put together what I would want. If you're transferring large amounts of data yeah, wouldn't work. You can't transfer an AVI onto your Pi if you're running an AVR. Maybe grayscale images on ePaper. But what would you want to do exactly? Would you be mad if you had a 1-3 second latency/refresh interval on your terminal? i.e. you might wait up to 1-3 seconds before seeing a server->client message or the result of your command? You could run stuff like Lynx and whatnot pretty reasonably on a host like that if you needed, especially if the view was buffered (i.e. you can scroll instantly within the buffer and the buffer updates every 1-3 seconds) and maybe refresh interval was dynamically controlled by user activity level and expected processing time. It all depends on how much data you want to push, fundamentally you can't beat Shannon-Hartley, if you want to browse Usenet for VGA porn GIFs you have to spend the power. Otherwise you compress and buffer like it's 1975, because yeah wireless transmission is crazy expensive in the power budget. Even a continuous 50mA at 3V is still a crazy amount lower than a Pi's 400-1000 mA at 5V though. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Aug 11, 2015 |
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Aug 11, 2015 05:22
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Paul MaudDib posted:If you're transferring large amounts of data yeah, wouldn't work. You can't transfer an AVI onto your Pi if you're running an AVR. Well like I said something of a stripped down Linux CLI box is what I would like. Something that I could take instead of a laptop for working on a servers or routers/switches. Basically all I would need is the ability to SSH/Telnet into stuff, tftp/sftp/ftp and whatnot. There is value to something that you can take onto a site that you aren't worried about being stolen/destroyed/compromised and just does the job you need it to do. As well as not having to worry about battery life which I know I have ran into situations where you run low of power and there isn't a place to get a charge from. I know something like this wouldn't sell millions but I know there are a lot of IT professionals like myself that would love to have something like this.
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Aug 11, 2015 05:38
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Djarum posted:Well like I said something of a stripped down Linux CLI box is what I would like. Something that I could take instead of a laptop for working on a servers or routers/switches. Basically all I would need is the ability to SSH/Telnet into stuff, tftp/sftp/ftp and whatnot. There is value to something that you can take onto a site that you aren't worried about being stolen/destroyed/compromised and just does the job you need it to do. As well as not having to worry about battery life which I know I have ran into situations where you run low of power and there isn't a place to get a charge from. What's your protocol, USB HID or Ethernet? Can you pull power over USB or something? Yeah I understand that need totally. The beauty of modern embedded poo poo is it's literally just a matter of wiring components and systems together. VT100 for AVR exists, it's probably just wiring in an SPI display and an ethernet breakout from there. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Aug 11, 2015 |
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Aug 11, 2015 06:09
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Paul MaudDib posted:What's your protocol, USB HID or Ethernet? Can you pull power over USB or something? Well most stuff that I deal with at least is Ethernet, 802.11 or Serial which I just use a USB to Serial adaptor. What I would like is in a form factor like the early Kindles which the embedded keyboard and a e-Ink display, 2 USB ports, a ethernet, WIFI and Bluetooth. With the thickness to include a ethernet port you could fit a pretty drat big battery into it although seeing how form factors they can get big mAh batteries into now that isn't surprising. I'd like 16-24 hour use and 3-4 week standby battery life. Basically make it a IT guy's multitool. A multitool isn't anyone's first choice when having to fix something but it can do the job and if you are in situations where it is not possible to bring in a ton of gear it can save your rear end. The more I think about it the more I am amazed no one has built and produced this thing. It seems like such a no brainer.
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Aug 11, 2015 06:32
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22 Eargesplitten posted:Spending hours trying to figure out why I was crashing to desktop while playing Half Life 2. I think it was a driver conflict or something. No, gaben is garbage. We didn't get cable until 2007, wish I could find my old screenshots of Steam in its infancy on dialup "Updating...2486 minutes remaining". I got mom and dad to let me open the game before Christmas so I could make sure it ran, and was able to keep on top of the updates so I could play Christmas day. I never did finish the game due to the constant crashes, always found HL massively overrated anyway. Remember the old Detonator drivers you could get? My first rig wasn't that far back, P4 1.4/256/40gb with a 32mb TNT2 Model 64 Pro. Later added this AOpen 5.1 sound card which I hooked two sets of computer speakers up to for a 4.0 setup. Then when I got the Geforce FX 5200, S-Video? Man that was the poo poo then, using my 19" tv in my room for a second monitor (mostly for playing emulators and poo poo). I remember ditching the loving junk Daytek 17" CRT that was just really dark and wouldn't light up properly for a Samsung 19" LCD, that was only 7 or 8 years ago. That box is still at home, just needs an IDE hard drive. I kinda wanna make something of it. I was cleaning out my closet while visiting home over the weekend and found a few old gamepads, the Propad 6, is Interact even a thing anymore? The Logitech Wingman, the original and the reason I to this day loving hate Logitech. I remember when my brother got his Pentium 2, Rogue Squadron was one of the big standouts in those days, along with all other Star Wars games I could get my hands on. The Sims. UT. He had some other junk before that that I picked around with after he moved out, I have no idea as to the specs. It was of the DOS era, I used to play Duke Nukem 2 on that. I found this sign making program and printed out some banners on the old dot matrix printer (theres a government office here that still uses one for printing invoices). I never had access to a lot of software or games in those days.
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Aug 11, 2015 14:51
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Djarum posted:Well like I said something of a stripped down Linux CLI box is what I would like. Something that I could take instead of a laptop for working on a servers or routers/switches. Basically all I would need is the ability to SSH/Telnet into stuff, tftp/sftp/ftp and whatnot. There is value to something that you can take onto a site that you aren't worried about being stolen/destroyed/compromised and just does the job you need it to do. As well as not having to worry about battery life which I know I have ran into situations where you run low of power and there isn't a place to get a charge from. Your answer is unironically an old android device with USB otg or running Linux on a kindle . Or a chromebook. ssh/sftp would not be fun or particularly usable on a 1mhz device or anything, and you're not gonna find the functionality you're looking for in a smaller device, though you could theoretically rig an eink screen and a battery (lion from a phone or a portable) to a beaglebone or (better) a digilent
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Aug 11, 2015 15:02
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Paul MaudDib posted:But like - hasn't someone hammered this poo poo out during the VT100 days? Hello retro thread, please advise me on archaic terminal protocols. Buffered input like that is more of a mainframe thing - you'd want to look at the IBM 3270 or something. Trouble is that Unix isn't built for those, it expects interactive terminals - hit tab to complete at your bash prompt and you expect it to complete immediately, for example, or hit arrow key down in vi needs to go to vi to register the hit and send back the escape sequence to move the cursor. You'd have to come up with a custom editor (or whatever) for your AVR, oooor make it literally a dumb teletype I guess.
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Aug 11, 2015 15:36
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feedmegin posted:Buffered input like that is more of a mainframe thing - you'd want to look at the IBM 3270 or something. Trouble is that Unix isn't built for those, it expects interactive terminals - hit tab to complete at your bash prompt and you expect it to complete immediately, for example, or hit arrow key down in vi needs to go to vi to register the hit and send back the escape sequence to move the cursor. You'd have to come up with a custom editor (or whatever) for your AVR, oooor make it literally a dumb teletype I guess. UNIX came into existence a long, long time ago, on micros, minis, and mainframes. It handles this use case great. ed works fine, and vi was designed for operating this way, though vim may not be very nice. The point of a modal editor with very terse commands is actually that it gets by very nicely on extremely limited bandwidth. Anything that depends on readline is going to be ugly. But there's still a world of stuff (and shells) that don't depend on readline. ksh should be fine, for example. UNIX terminals operate in canonical mode by default, meaning that the terminal kernel buffers the entire line before sending it, and all of this stuff works basically the way you'd expect it to. readline would be bad. ICANON is fine.
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Aug 11, 2015 20:54
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evol262 posted:Your answer is unironically an old android device with USB otg or running Linux on a kindle . Or a chromebook. ssh/sftp would not be fun or particularly usable on a 1mhz device or anything, and you're not gonna find the functionality you're looking for in a smaller device, though you could theoretically rig an eink screen and a battery (lion from a phone or a portable) to a beaglebone or (better) a digilent Rooting a kindle is the most plausible way to get there for sure. How good is the battery life with active usage of the wifi like that? Probably no good on the internal battery, but you could run it for a good long while on one of those big 25 amp-hour USB battery packs. Is USB-OTG physically supported on a Kindle? I just like the idea of a purpose-built low power wireless terminal and thinking about how it might be implemented. I think a 32-bit micro is more plausible than an 8-bit. More pins, more processor power, more memory/flash, maybe even a built-in USB-OTG host. But even that might struggle during key exchange. Maybe you could add a small FPGA to help with that while connecting or something. Come to think of it I bet the Kindle doesn't connect real quickly either, unless whatever ARM core happens to have hardware acceleration. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Aug 12, 2015 |
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Aug 12, 2015 00:20
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The kindle's battery lasts long enough, and no otg, but older kindles have a full(-ish) keyboard. Key exchange is reasonably snappy. Key generation makes you want to kill yourself. It's hard to beat a chromebook. It's $100, has real usb host support, WiFi, a chording keyboard, a display, and a reasonable battery. But retro thread. Get a cheap SoC with WiFi, wedge an eink display on (with the console on UART and only a getty on the display), and go from there. Or get a wyse term, rip the guts out, stick a battery on, add an eink display, take the keyboard out of one of those cheap RF deals and add it. Or get a cheap FPGA and design your own circuit that does it all. Or make an atmel work.
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Aug 12, 2015 02:04
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Djarum posted:Basically make it a IT guy's multitool. A multitool isn't anyone's first choice when having to fix something but it can do the job and if you are in situations where it is not possible to bring in a ton of gear it can save your rear end. The more I think about it the more I am amazed no one has built and produced this thing. It seems like such a no brainer. Honestly, although not their intention and not well-known to many in the field, Chromebooks do fit that niche well--they're cheap, fairly rugged (kids and all), fanless, have quite good battery life, can run SSH/SFTP "out of the box", and you can get the full-suite of Linux CLI and even GUI tools by putting it in developer mode and installing Debian/Ubuntu via crouton. It's also helpful that they feature a full web browser and PDF viewer since "consulting documentation" is one of the biggest things I end up doing on site. The OS is a nice combination of not having backwards-compatibility baggage so they can use ARM or Atom processors, but also being well supported enough that you're not constantly rolling the Linux compatibility dice. That said, with Haswell, Intel has been closing the power-consumption gap even with "real" CPUs, with high-end models (MacBook Air, ThinkPad Yoga, XPS 13, etc.) having solid battery life and being all-around fantastic portable devices. I still feel less guilty about accidentally bashing a $200 Chomebook into the side of a rack, and the ability to pick up a replacement at Best Buy has unbeatable convenience. Honestly I'd be less inclined to use a purpose-specific tool due to ability or fear of procuring a replacement. For example, I have a 2013 cellular Nexus 7 that's indispensable for other tasks, and, should it break, I'd have nothing to replace it with and hope I could find another one on eBay.
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Aug 13, 2015 17:22
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How's the serial port situation on stock Chromebooks? I use a USB-Serial adapter in my daily work and everything I've read basically says that the Chromebook equivalent of PuTTYing a serial connection isn't really doable at the moment.
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Aug 13, 2015 17:52
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Paul MaudDib posted:Rote memorization I can't agree with you enough. Training a human to replicate tasks a computer can do but only several magnitudes less efficient is a true expression of unneeded stupidity.
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Aug 13, 2015 17:54
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Sheep posted:How's the serial port situation on stock Chromebooks? The stock kernel includes modules for a bunch of USB serial adapters, including the PL2303 I have and FTDI chips, so there's not much effort involved in getting it working.
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Aug 13, 2015 21:02
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Bump for hopeless computer history nerd stuff. I collect a few things. * My first computer was a 486sx33 (later upgraded to a dx2) with a 4x cdrom drive and 200MB disk in 1993. That disk never went bad in the 15 years I had it. I kind of missed the entire EISA/Vesa bus era and went from that hardware to AMD Athlon boards. I ran linux in an 80mb partition for a long time. * I have owned an XT Sperry, and some ancient IBM thing with the external 8" toaster disk drive. Had to give both up for a move, along with various old Apple servers and things. * SGI O2 with Irix on it. * ex-Defence HP twin Xeon power guzzler that is a weird crossover of the IDE/SATA era, but boy could it chew through computations. * I have an old Toshiba Tegra laptop with some ridiculous amount of RAM for its time (80 meg or something). Weighs a ton. * obligatory C64 with ide64 card. * Remember DAT tape drives? 2.88mb floppy drives? I have weird peripherals like that hanging around. There are still computers which can use them (any HP dc7xxx still has floppy drive headers). * About 10 years ago I bought an old Alpha Server 2000 off ebay and it sat in a friends shed for most of that time before we got around to looking at its internals. Amazingly one of the drives is still readable and had Digital Unix 3.2C on it: it was the University of Melbourne computer science faculty hub in the mid-90s, with logins from Robert Elz and other historical figures. Mach Unix is weird. * I have an old HP serial terminal that's a bit fussy; I'd like a proper multi-mode one that doesn't barf on ncurses ansi codes. Just about the only hardware thing I'd really want is some form of little microvax instead of simh emulators, but they're hard to find and not cheap to ship.
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