Homebrew Microcontroller Laptop, Made of Wood

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Homebrew Microcontroller Laptop, Made of Wood

Posted by timothy on Tuesday March 17, 2009 @04:33AM 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."

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Pretty fast! by CannonballHead · 2009-03-17 04:36 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.
1. Re:Pretty fast! by evanbd · 2009-03-17 04:58 · 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 · 2009-03-17 05:13 · 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 · 2009-03-17 05:41 · 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.
Catching fire by Mishotaki · 2009-03-17 04:42 · Score: 4, Funny

At least, if this laptop catches fire, it won't burn black, toxic, smoke like most laptops do.
1. Re:Catching fire by sgt+scrub · 2009-03-17 04:45 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  I for one welcome cleaner burning laptops.
  
  --
  Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Whoops! by SkOink · 2009-03-17 04:43 · Score: 4, Funny

It looks like he tried to host the link from his laptop :(

--
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
Seems kinda low-spec as a starting point by Mr+Z · 2009-03-17 04:53 · Score: 5, Interesting

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!
Re:Now for something totally different... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-03-17 05:09 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
Re:Nobody needs more than 16k... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-03-17 05:17 · Score: 5, Funny

...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?
Re:Nobody needs more than 16k... by vadim_t · 2009-03-17 06:25 · Score: 5, Funny

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:

HELO thewoods.org MAIL FROM: vadimt@thewoods.org RCPT TO: somebody@gmail.com DATA Subject: I'm the woods What's up? .

Then to read email:

USER vadimt PASS bears34 LIST RETR 1 QUIT

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.