Intro

I’ve recently had the itch to work on electronics again. From my last project, the 6502 chiplab, I came away with a longing for a simple, well designed platform that could be fully understood by the user/developer. Like the 6502 itself.

Popular computers today are built around undocumented spyware, designed by companies that want to trap you in their bubble, so they can extract as much as they can from you.

Computing used to be about empowerment. “A bicycle for the mind”. It seems somewhere we took a wrong turn. Can we turn back the clock?

We’ve decided to design a more open, hacker friendly pocket computer.

By starting with a few simple use cases, I think we can build something that is simple enough for any motivated individual to completely understand.

Hardware and Applications

The core computing hardware needs to be simple enough to be understandable by users, and fast enough to be useful for the tasks we need to complete. We can start with applications that benefit from being easy to understand. This includes both education and hobby development, where the goal is the joy and understanding that comes from building something by hand.

There are also some high assurance applications where users want to be sure that their hardware is acting in their best interest.

For both applications, I think we can get by with a relatively powerful microcontroller. A microcontroller, not a full microprocessor with an MMU, means we can effectively program the device without requiring a massive operating system to support it. You get to control 100% of the device, so even modest hardware can be very fast.

We reached the moon with a CPU running at around 2 MHz with about 32k of memory. We’re targetting ~100MHz for the first device which should be plenty for a lot of awesome apps.

Prototyping

Our initial prototypes are around widely available ARM microcontrollers from ST Microelectronics. The first set of applications we have in mind require relatively modest IO. We’re aiming towards something like a calculator in form-factor, and expanding in size for later iterations.

Emulation

Our team has a decent amount of experience building emulators and compiling for the browser. So in addition to building the physical hardware for this device, we’re planning to make it possible to run applications on your traditional computer. This can be helpful for during development, or even just to make it easier to share what you’ve built.

We’re also planning on building a web-based application runner, making it even easier.

Stay tuned! Feel free to send us an email if this device sounds interesting or you have other ideas you’d like to see incorporated.