Actually 100 hours is an understatement. It'll go at least 200 hours of constant active use on a single charge, even if you don't use power saving mode, and can easily get 500 hours or a lot more using power saving mode.
Love it! Any idea how long the display can last? I've been playing around with e-paper (nothing as impressive as this!) dashboards. I use Waveshare displays that has a max of 1 million refresh cycles. The display you've used seems more capable.<p>My own humble e-paper projects:<p><a href="https://www.asciimx.com/projects/e-reader/" rel="nofollow">https://www.asciimx.com/projects/e-reader/</a>
<a href="https://www.asciimx.com/projects/etlas/" rel="nofollow">https://www.asciimx.com/projects/etlas/</a>
I think there is a class of device here that is missing. Low power but forever devices that have some basic functionality. Over time I could see this taking over laptops and the like as ultra-low-power became more and more capable.
This is running under emulation, but I wonder if the power savings would be even more (an order of magnitude?) if the hardware was "gate accurate" to the original but shrunken down to a modern CMOS process.<p>I find it amusing that the keyboard has a Windows key. Does anyone recognise what laptop it was originally from? It can't be a Thinkpad since there's no pointing stick, and I seem to remember some early Dells having a similar odd layout, but it's definitely an older one given the keys aren't islands. Odd placement of home/end and that right shift key aside, that actually looks better than most if not all laptop keyboards today (ins/del/home/end aren't Fn'd, and there's full-size arrow keys!)
Take my money.<p>No, really, this is precisely the sort of thing I've wanted for ages, and I don't have the time or resources to build it myself.
Not an XT clone per se. XT had 8088 CPU, CGA/Hercules display adapter, and a 640KB RAM with a PC speaker. This one has 80186 and 1MB RAM with MCGA (VGA) and Adlib emulation too. It's better than an XT.
The HP Palmtop IBM PC compatible clones also had very long battery life--on double AA batteries:<p><a href="https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-golden-age-of-hp-palmtop-pcs" rel="nofollow">https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-golden-age-of-hp-palmtop-pcs</a>
I use my boox max lumi as a secondary display daily for working in emacs. The eink is great for text/terminal use, the only issue I have is when i sometimes need to do any kind of mouse work (which, is basically never, when I use it for what I said above).<p>What I really want is a low power linux laptop that is not entirely without CPU/memory power, so I can program some simple things on it. I don't mind if it has _less_ power, I can use ssh for anything that is overly cpu-hungry.<p>Ive seen several devices that seem like they might suit my need, but I look at them for long enough and just won't pull the trigger. Either it seems overly much like a walled garden (like, I can program on the device, but it doesn't seem like a suitable spot to write blog posts in emacs for my blog or whatever), or its just too underpowered and I'm sure that 99% of the tools I use already won't work on it.<p>I wish I had the EE knowledge/confidence to start hacking on this kind of thing. I think its very doable; I was just looking at e.g. <a href="https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/epaper-1/13.3inch-e-paper-hat.htm?___SID=U" rel="nofollow">https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/epaper-1/...</a><p>which is just cheap enough that I could see myself risking buying it without being sure that it will work with my other choices.<p>Nowadays, I feel like I should be able to run most of what I want on an android device that is built for power, and it should have a fairly long lasting battery because of its design; attach a trackpad, keyboard, and eink display, and my perfect device is here. I don't care if its not the thinnest device in the universe, a swappable battery (or, just load the thing with extra batteries) plus perhaps a portable solar charger would be amazing.
Pretty dang cool. Well done.<p>My ideal setup before eyeing the e-ink space was a linux-based netbook and occasional internet access to offload heavy compute to powerful servers. I could see using this sort of setup in a similar fashion.
This is awesome, only wish it was a 486DX2 with 4/8MB RAM instead, that would increase the possibilities of running more heavier operating systems, like Windows 95.<p>Also, is there a mention of the refresh rate of the display? I wonder what gaming on it would be like. They provided a screenshot of Test Drive and Wolf3D running on it, but a video would've been nicer.
The idea of a laptop with an e-ink display running Linux and having days of battery life is really interesting.<p>To save others doing what I did there is an Android tablet like this called 'Daylight'<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43098318">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43098318</a>
It would be really neat if the emulator had some kind of "escape mode" where it could jump to and run the native instruction set.<p>It could even be implemented to look like some kind of extension card in RAM. You write native instructions to a piece of RAM and call a special (otherwise invalid) 8086 instruction and the native execution kicks in.<p>Or if you want to make it more ambitious, create a COM or EXE format which indicates that the instructions are really ESP32 native, but with full access to the BIOS functions with some kind of translation layer.
Powered by ESP32, which reportedly uses archaic 40nm technology. Aren't there some good ARM microprocessors built with 5nm technology, which would consume comparable power?
This makes me wonder: Are there any solar-powered navigation computers? It would be cool to have an off-grid navigation computer that can load all openstreetmap tiles.
3 decades ago I did upgrade logistics for NMR labs using HP and Nixdorf based backends to run the machines. What amazed me was how the HP gui was X10. pre X10R4. They decided "good enough" and commercialised a species of interface with a trackball and keyboard, which at least in terms of GUI styling was 1:1 congruent with X10R1 as I saw it in 85 or so. I continue to notice this interface on Ultrasound and like, I guess having coded the FPGAs to work, they just stopped changing it.<p>It wouldn't surprise me if XT was similar. I remember doing a pre-purchase review of DirecTV and the sat management was OS/2, long long after it was deprecated. Same behaviour in aerospace: keep the tech which works. This is why German armed forces were recently commissioning USB compatible SD type storage with insanely huge plugs, and slow interfaces, to replace 8" and 5.25" media for field upgrades of some devices.
Goodisplay says "Although the refresh rate of monochrome e-paper displays is faster than that of color e-paper, we still recommend allowing at least a 180-second interval after completing a set of display updates. Frequent updates can negatively impact the lifespan of the ePaper."<p><a href="https://www.good-display.com/news/80.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.good-display.com/news/80.html</a><p>So I guess playing Space Quest a lot will rapidly kill that screen.
Reminds me of playing SimCity and learning Turbo C on my IBM PC Convertible with its far inferior non-backlit monochrome display.<p>Interesting that they Sharpied-out all of the extraneous keys, except Windows.
It sounds like it would be an awesome portable terminal emulator. Are there any good terminal emulator applications for DOS? How is the Minix 2.0 experience if you go that route?
Super cool. I wonder how this would work with one of those transflective LCDs, like the Sharp Memory thing they used in the Playdate.<p>There's a bit more latency than I'd like with the typing. Though maybe that could be fixed on eink with partial updates?<p>For me the main benefit of a device like this would be reading and writing without distractions, so having it run DOOM smoothly would not help me! But I do really want low latency typing...
For a true prepper PC a RISC-V machine running Linux with these kinds of specs would be ideal. Even more cool would be a crank charger along with the solar panels.<p>Outfit it with a LORA modem capable of running one of those peer to peer LORA mesh text messaging protocols.
This is an incredible project! For someone looking to build their own Evertop using this repo, are there any specific hardware schematics, component lists, or 3D print files included or planned to be shared in the future to help with replication?
Interesting hardware.<p>The IBM emulation stuff—it is a project, the some 40 year old OS seems quite limiting, but I can see why one might do that for fun. But, the hardware looks like… maybe something folks might actually buy? Maybe only us, here, though, haha.
This actually has some super cool field digital note taking applications, where one may be away from power for a long time and just needs a digital means of writing TXT files. Awesome work!!
While I love the work, it is more like an adaptation, I am quite certain there were no PS/2 keyboards back in XT days, rather the classical din pin one.<p>PS/2 keyboards are early 1990's.