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Homebrew Microcontroller Laptop, Made of Wood

Posted by timothy on from the logically-if-she's-made-of-wood dept.

Brietech writes "This is a homebrew laptop project based on a Picaxe microcontroller. It has 16kb of RAM, 256kb of storage, sound and a self-hosted development environment! It has a simple CLI, file-system, 'EMAXE' text editor and a programming language called 'Chris#.' Oh, and yes, it runs Linaxe."

3 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Pretty fast! by evanbd · · Score: 4, Informative

    Actually, it probably isn't. It's probably not even close. The site is slashdotted badly, but I'm guessing this is an 8-bit CPU. Most microcontrollers of this sort take several clocks per instruction. And the instruction set is probably more limited in capability than x86.

    Also, I have to wonder why use an obscure part rather than the Atmel chips that are wildly popular with open source enthusiasts, or even the Microchip PICs (not quite as popular as the Atmels, but still has a strong hobbyist following). Having a development community and existing software base is useful.

  2. Re:Pretty fast! by MightyYar · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you check out the Coral Cached version of the site, you can see that the guy is not after something with an existing development community or software base. He's written his own everything, and seems to have a sense of humor about it. He even implemented Pong, and says that he someday hopes to achieve parity with an early 80s computer :)

    --
    W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
  3. Re:Pretty fast! by MightyYar · · Score: 4, Informative

    Again, read the link:

    Well, after a far-too-long hiatus, I'm back with a new Picaxe-based laptop! This project was born of a desire to see how far I can push the lowly Picaxe microcontroller. A friend of mine likened it to "spending over a year to reinvent the square wheel."

    He's doing it as a hobby, and he's not pretending that it is useful. He compares it to a "square wheel"!

    --
    W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.