On Thursday 11 July 2013 18:43:55 James "Xakh" Lynch wrote: > Judging by the amount of handheld devices cropping up lately, I'm not sure > we truly need to be confined to the nanonote's original dimensions, or > specifications in general. The Arduino would be a good place to start, in > my opinion, and adding a fan to the design would very much improve the > capability of such a device, in my opinion.
As far as I can see, the big advantage of "rebasing" on Arduino is that other people are likely to produce large numbers of the original board and also various clones, so it should be easy to get hold of the hardware and get support for it. I don't think you'll get that from stuff like the GCW-Zero and Open Pandora, which are things that are quite close to the NanoNote in various ways, but it would also be nice to see some development from those devices, too. > To me, having an open handheld > would be a great way for me to install a pure-python port of Blender and a > few CAD-like programs, to design on the go, so I'm certainly a bit biased > toward buffing up the hardware. Perhaps overclocking support as well? Just > thoughts. What aren't just little thoughts are that using replacement part > channels would be a great system, as getting in touch with a company that > already manufactures parts to another company's spec, with universal, cheap > parts means we could make revisions of the next device (is the name still > Ya? I liked that one), allowing us to gradually increase it, and add > support for newer models without having to do what we're doing now; picking > up the pieces left behind and trying to solve things like a monkey with a > jigsaw puzzle. Part sourcing seems to be a big challenge, at least as far as I can tell from my limited experience of looking for components with certain capabilities (and reading other people's experiences). I'm sure some people are well-practised in filtering components efficiently when looking through the channels, but documenting the different options and effectively maintaining some kind of "virtual supply chain" would probably be interesting and useful. > We really need to rise up from the ashes and forge a new > path. I'm not sure where the money would come from, though I guarantee a > kickstarter or indiegogo would do really well if the capability was enough. > Advertising on Reddit and through free culture blogs could really get the > support we need to get off the ground again. We need to let go of some of > our squabbling, let's not become the HURD of hardware, an incredible goal, > marred by stunted and weak execution. Actually, I did consider looking at the Hurd for the NanoNote because the hardware is fully supported by Free Software and thus there shouldn't be issues with driver development and undocumented hardware. I actually believe that something like the Hurd would be beneficial for hardware hacking because one should be able to do driver development in user space and not have to cross-build the kernel and/or modules extensively and have to deal with the constraints imposed on kernel code, although I accept that there would be other constraints on user space driver code just by its very nature. (Just looking at some more general kernel module code made me wonder if there wasn't a better way because some of it was just awful.) But I agree on looking more forward than backward: there's a lot of interest in hardware hacking, and there may very well be opportunities if we are willing to engage with the changing demographic instead of pretending we are above people doing Arduino stuff (which I know, at least, I am not). Paul _______________________________________________ Qi Hardware Discussion List Mail to list (members only): [email protected] Subscribe or Unsubscribe: http://lists.en.qi-hardware.com/mailman/listinfo/discussion
