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Homebrew Microcontroller Laptop, Made of Wood
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."
CPU: Picaxe 28X-1 Microcontrollers. The main CPU runs at a blistering 16 Mhz, and has a whopping 4 kilobytes of onboard storage for the processorâ(TM)s firmware/OS.
That's faster than my 11 or 12 MHz 286... of course, that was 17 years ago.
Does it run Lin-...You know what? It's time to start a new meme. How about "Does it run Vista?"
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
I thought it was a beer thing.
Anyone got a mirror?
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
So...it weighs less than a duck?
At least, if this laptop catches fire, it won't burn black, toxic, smoke like most laptops do.
A nicely finished wooden case for a laptop would be nice. I f we could get around the microwave radiation issues and the heat issue.
He says he's going to get it up to roughly the same power that an early 80's home computer had. It looks like he's not far off.
It looks like he tried to host the link from his laptop :(
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
This kind of articles, really really cool. But why the laptop casing, why not make it into a wearable? LED display mounted on left lower arm, chorded keypad on the right lower arm.
Good for kids... but nothing serious...
Common sense is not common
I saw a video of Joe Rogan doing standup. The guy is a total loon, but he made a really interesting point about our technological society, and how smart we tend to think we are.
He posed the question, if you were in the woods with nothing but a hatchet, how long before you could send an email?
This device may not compare favorably with commercially available computing platforms, but having people in our society with curious minds and an ability to make things is invaluable.
I'd rather be a Morlock than an Eloi. I'd rather be a rancher than a steer.
-Peter
I should switch to Chris# solely for the TG instruction: play "Eye of the Tiger".
I don't know much about the PICaxe, but for $8 (single unit qtys) you can buy an 80MHz MIPS microcontroller with a lot going for it. This one has 32KB of onboard RAM and 512K of flash.
Program Intellivision!
Haha, oh man. Linaxe carries with it an implementation of Pong at the bottom of the source code. So this wooden laptop runs pong.
I think we're somehow coming full-circle, here.
Damn. Kinda goes against the ethos, doesn't it? Or are they trying to replicate Budweiser?
Best Slashdot Co
will be made of stone, and use a small bird with a stone tablet as a processor.
Is Slashdot turning into Hack a Day today, or what?
Too bad he also tried to run his server off of it.
So, it weighs the same as a duck?
What a total waste of time. Don't they have better things to do?
He built a laptop with his time. All you've done is post a whiney comment on slashdot. On the whole, I think it's you who needs some better things to do with their time.
... running the site on the laptop - with this much load now, it's a fire hazard.
That's awesome. That's all I really have to say. A portable pong and text editing machine.
...if you were in the woods with nothing but a hatchet, how long before you could send an email?
Depends, how many people do I have to kill to get to the PC?
if you were in the woods with nothing but a hatchet, how long before you could send an email?
Even if you knew everything - it would literally take decades to do it "right." It took the entire human race with practically unlimited resources about 132 years once we had the most basic understanding of electronics (telephone). Even knowing every concept doesn't put you ahead by much without an existing manufacturing base.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Apparently you never watch Gilligan's Island. The Prof. would have had email within a week.
Unfortunately, it would have only been able to send messages to Princes in Nigeria, thus not being able to render them help in getting of the island.
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
I just found out that, as the name clearly suggests, it's a preprogrammed PIC microcontroller.
See for yourself at http://www.rev-ed.co.uk/picaxe/ in the Technical Frequently Asked Questions PDF file:
What is a PICAXE microcontroller?
A PICAXE microcontroller is a Microchip PIC microcontroller that has been pre-
programmed with the PICAXE bootstrap code. The bootstrap code enables the
microcontroller to be reprogrammed without the need for an (expensive)
conventional programmer, making the whole download system a very low-cost
simple serial cable!
The bootstrap code also contains common routines (such as how to generate a
pause delay or a sound output), so that each download does not have to waste time
downloading this commonly required data. This makes the download time much
quicker.
I'm sure this "laptop" would have been much faster if based around an AVR. But that would have required more work.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
"Unfortunately, it would have only been able to send messages to Princes in Nigeria, thus not being able to render them help in getting of the island."
Give the guy a break! He was already to the point of sending to SOMEONE. In a few days he probably could've sent an email to anyone. Too bad that idiot Gilligan knocked over and broke the Professor's coconut e-mailer. Funny how the idea was workable expect for one flaw not associated with the actual plan and instead of trying again they just abandoned it entirely.
Gee! this ones 4 times better than my TRS-80! Mine is a 4MHz 64KB, (48KB addressable.) I did put a lowercase kit in it though, for word processing. Sigh, those were the days.
The idea of running Linux on a PicAxe microcontroller must excite a lot of people... Every link to a project or explanation of "linaxe" results in 404 errors and more 404 errors.
I can't read the article because it's slashdotted, but this 2-year old slashdot story links to the same site.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/05/1220220
What if you are in the woods without even a hatchet? How long until you have a simple hatchet?
Probably not all that long until most people have some sort of edge to work with (find 2 stones, smash, presto!). But how long until you come up with something that is reasonably light and has a handle?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Except for the built in BASIC on the Picaxe the AVRs have a lot going for em. I have also pondered the idea of building a low tech computer just to see how much could be done on something that would bring the term 'low power' back down to Model 100 levels and perhaps even finally surpass 1980's tech.
You can get MRAM in the same package as the old school SRAM and some of the AVRs have an external memory interface that appears compatible. So that would allow some really deep sleeping, just push everything out of the on chip RAM and kill all power, with none of the bother associated with flash like write count limits or worrying about the time/power to copy everything in/out. If you totally kill power you couldn't use the onboard RTC but that could go on the i2c bus with a self contained button cell like on a real laptop.
If you could keep the display and input device power onsumption low enough alternative power could really be useful. Think solar powered information kiosks for example. You could run them off power harvested from street lights. No backup battery to replace, totally sealed agsinst the elements and abuse. But nobody thinks low tech like this, any proposed project has to be x86, run Windows etc. Or if somebody is really thinking outside the box they would propose an ARM running Linux or WinCE and again be consuming ten or more times the power than an AVR and a mono LCD just to run the backlight on a color TFT lcd display.
Democrat delenda est
I tried to install Vista on it and what do you know it wooden go.
I'll just be going then <shame>
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
I almost cried when I saw that thist thing
is powered by 4 AA batteries. Dell should sit
back and learn ! lol
Overuse of the Pumping Lemma causes blindness
He posed the question, if you were in the woods with nothing but a hatchet, how long before you could send an email?
As long as it takes for some hiker with a smartphone to come by, plus a few minutes to clean the blood off the hatchet.
This device may not compare favorably with commercially available computing platforms, but having people in our society with curious minds and an ability to make things is invaluable.
Agreed - this is a very cool project.
I have recently been working with amateur packet radio, which is somewhere in between the linked project and modern technology. In addition to a computer you only need a radio transceiver and some simple circuitry connecting it to the audio in/out ports, and you can send email to a similarly-equipped station within the range of your radio (at speeds between 300 and 9600 baud). There are people who build their own radios and adapters but I'm doing it the easy way with commercial units.
As a more serious answer to your "alone in the woods" question, someone with the right skills could actually get a morse code transmitter running with some surprisingly low-tech materials. Look here for example - you don't even need a transistor or vacuum tube.
People need to realise this is more like the an adult getting to do their version of a science fair project like some of us did in HS. Writting a binary/hex/octal/decimal conversion program or connecting a mobile armatron to a PC are just some of my examples. it wasn't becuase we had to (well we didn't have to go to that level) or would make money, it was because it was something challenging and a way to get to work on things we normally never would have. I wish I had the time to work on things like this.
Life is pain. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
Oh, that would be doable fairly quickly.
First, you need to find some pigeons or some other suitable birds. You will also figure out how to make something resembling paper (shouldn't be too difficult with all the wood in the woods), and some means to write (something suitable should be available as well)
Once you managed to train some of them to deliver messages, you send one asking for RFC791 and RFC793, unless you're a networking expert and know them from memory. RFC 792 would be also recommended. You will also need RFC 1149, but that one is short and is best memorized before you get lost in the woods. Optionally, RFC 2549 could provide better service.
The next thing to do is to implement RFC 1149, and use that to talk to a mail server. Anybody with some mail experience should know how to use mail over a telnet session. Just make sure to memorize the IP addresses of a SMTP and a POP3 server (no problem if you run your own server and remember the address). Then just connect and send something like:
Then to read email:
Latency could be a bit annoying with having to send all those pigeons back and forth, and a good spam filter would be needed server-side if you don't want to spend weeks getting rid of it before you get anything useful, but in a couple of weeks it could be done.
Once this is going, the next step would be starting an open source project to implement IP over smoke signals, or optical telegraph, in case something happens to the pigeons, and to reduce latency. Also implementing DNS would help with talking to the rest of the net.
Once all this is working you can start really improving your tech, by requesting pages from wikipedia on anything you don't know enough about.
Yes, well persistence would have made for a very short series. Didn't they actually get off the island once and then somehow wrecked right back onto the same island?
I think you pretty much had to suspend your reality-meter to enjoy the show.
My Sharp PC 1403H has 200+ hrs uptime on two buttoncells under full load. It's predecessor (my very first computer, bought back in 1986) has the same specs but only 4KB RAM instead of 32. I have yet to find a portable computer that can beat it's uptime off the grid. The Palm m105 with folding keyboard came the closest, but still was 160+ hrs short with it's mere 40 hrs battery time under load.
Does this baby have that potential? That would actually make it interesting, even today.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Agreed, it basically blows by our old Vic-20 -- 1.02MHz, 5KB (3.5KB user memory). Hmm, I bet that could be installed with this Linaxe .. .
Step by step.
The hatchet would make constructing the iron smelting furnace easier. I could use heel of the hatchet as a hammer at first.
Then I could build a waterwheel powered sawmill and lathe.
With the sawmill and lathe I could fashion a crude, steam engine powered, carriage.
With the carriage I could drive to Fry's and buy a laptop.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
I want to see him try and bring this on a plane- if it doesn't scream "DIY bomb" to a TSA employee, I don't know what does (aside from the conventional belled alarm clock, ticking watch, or vibrating automatic razor)
they wouldn't even let that guy and his macbook air through without giving him the run-around...
as a virtual machine under EMAXE?
It is still better than bluehost. At least dreamhost is more upfront about what you can and cannot do and they specifically say that your if your website is just a normal website such as a blog that it will not be taken down due to being slashdotted, dugg, etc.
But on another note....I want that laptop. Its so awesome. That one of those things that you do just to say you did it and to show off your 1337ness.
Christ I must say..you have done quite a good job proving your 1337ness and I commend you ^_^
If you are good with a router-a woodworking router I mean-you could take the case from your laptop and laminate the outside with some sort of pretty wood veneer, and that leaves whatever RF shielding it has intact. Thinking about it, it is such a small area to laminate you could do it with just hand tools if you are careful, say a razor knife. Make a nice construction paper pattern then lay it out on the veneer and cut away what you need, then glue it on. Anyway, I imagine it has already been done it seems so possible...I will look... here's a link to an example. This guy uses a laser cutter but I don't think that is necessary either if you are just careful enough. In the replies there they make a point of bringing up the heating option, I guess that wouldn't matter a whole lot if your lappy had fans though.
They make custom skins for cellphones, seems a little biz niche there to do it with laptops or perhaps the new netbooks....
It is well known that the fastest way to bootstrap both technology and the economy is with multi-level marketing.
Tag lost or not installed.
From a woodworking point of view, it's not all that impressive. It's not well finished, and if you look at the picture of it closed you can plainly see the marks from running through a planer.
Atmel is SO much better than any PIC. Atmel AVR microcontrollers are individually cheaper. They run at least four times faster for the same clock speed (one instruction per clock cycle instead of one instruction per four clocks for the PIC). They have a vastly more versatile and flexible instruction set. The AVRs are designed to be used with high level languages like Open Source GCC, not kluged BASIC for high school kids that the PICs use in their absurdly overpriced 'training' packages. Most AVRs now have the same boot-loader capacities that this PICAXE package is offering.
I use AVRs for sound programmer/editors based on hardware MIDI synthesizers like the Yamaha TX81Z. It's nearly impossible to do any MIDI work in Windows. The MIDI APIs in Windows are difficult, incomprehensible, and nearly undocumented. It's a real mess and will never get any better. The hell with it. I do all my MIDI development now for $3 AVR processors and $5 graphic and character LCD screens. Developing for the AVR is like being back the 1980s writing assembler for the Commodore 64 and Turbo C for DOS. But everything is 1/10th to 1/100th of the cost that it was then. And there are no !@#$%^& ultra-violet EPROM erasers needed. Check out my open source hardware synth editors on the Yahoo! Yamaha DX group(s).
Oh please, try to bring this laptop on your next flight and tell us what happen at airport security... That should be fun.
yes, building a board to program a picaxe chip requires little more than a 7805 and a single 2.2K resistor.
it runs a lot slower than a conventional pic chip, (but how often do you really need full speed for a microcontroller?)
Best of all, you can write your code entirely in BASIC, no need for messy assembly. (my sig should make it clear why this is a plus for me)
and, if you do need the extra speed, and you are all out of pic chips, you can put a picaxe chip in a standard pic programmer, and it will over-write everything (permanently).
I don't do too much electronics work these days, so simple is good. for the micro-controller stuff i do, the picaxe system is the best I've come across. I got rid of all my basic-stamp stuff after finding this system.
note: i do NOT work for picaxe, or any company that deals with them, i am just a very satisfied customer who has used this system for 3 years.
-I only code in BASIC.-
...a cigar humidor, except for the cheesy brass bits on the corners. In fact, if it ever goes balls up, rip out the guts and give it to me. I've got a handful of La Gloria Cubanas and a few Camacho El-Legendarios that would fit in there very nicely.
Joe Dougherty, Florida, USA
The words I thought I brought, I left behind. So, never mind.
More like returning to its roots.
A picaxe *is* a popular Microchip PIC, running a nifty bootstrap program developed by Revolution Education in the UK. It's intended to make microcontroller accessible to everyone, using a 3-wire in-circuit programming system so schools don't have to pay for a programmer, and so that kids can't break said programmer.
The development environment uses an intuitive BASIC compiler so people with no programming experience (pre-teen kids, or just biology graduates like myself) can be writing working programs in hours.
The IDE is free-as-in-beer and the picaxe chips are cheap (under five bucks for the smaller ones) and widely available.
Yes this is a plug, I'm not affiliated with Revolution Education but I probably wouldn't have had the stamina to get into microcontrollers without them.
There's a link to the manufacturer in the summary. http://www.rev-ed.co.uk/picaxe/
Kudos to the guy who built this laptop - building your own custom filesystem using only basic is pretty badass!
PS. If you really *must* use an Atmel CPU, a nice implementation is the Arduino. http://arduino.cc/en/Main/HomePage
sustainable living
It's the materials & it's the tools. Clean rooms, pure materials, testing equipment, chemicals. Even if we went for the lowest tech possible (60's era transistors, resistors, caps, core mem) you're still talking a couple of decades to identify material sources and refine techniques.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
"Think your pathetic EEE will make it on that flight to Japan? "
Good luck getting that thing on a plane.
While it may be possible, the lingering taste of latex gloves at the back of your throat will get tiresome.
Personally, if you opened that thing next to me on an international flight, I'd be inclined to smash your head in with it. ...but pretty cool, though!
I'll have to get back with you on that...in a few years.
I started the Vista Ultimate install on one of these in November of '08, so far the install has made it up to 6%.
The biggest problem is deleting most of the so far installed files to make room for the other 94% of the remaining install; damn all of those 'out of memory' and 'out of drive space' error messages.
Plus, Vista throws a major hissy fit when you do try to delete some of the install files!
Ask me about it in, oh...maybe 4 1/2 years or so.(and in a side by side shootout, an identical kit installing Kubuntu 8.10 has made it to 9%. But it throws an even bigger fit about deleting files during the install-had to pause the install and ssh in from my desktop and do a 'rm -rf' on the bugger)
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
it runs a lot slower than a conventional pic chip, (but how often do you really need full speed for a microcontroller?)
Best of all, you can write your code entirely in BASIC, no need for messy assembly. (my sig should make it clear why this is a plus for me)
Since you don't even have a .sig, I am confused whether you're trying to be hilarious or are actually even more forgetful than I am - which is not good.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
And if you find sulfur, salt peter, and charcoal while you're out there in the woods, you can use it with a piece of bamboo to fire crystals at the lizard man trying to kill you.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I hate these "Homebrew Xxxx" /. article titles. My initial, reactionary thought is always that the article has something to do with the more interesting topic of brewing beer from home. Then a second later my excitement fades when I realize it's just another tech article ...