This is a really cool project. I wish I was better at doing electronics construction, wish I could just buy one too. 40 hours of life on a coin battery is pretty impressive.
I'd love to buy this for my 8 year old - this week I taught her how to check her homework on elisp. The idea is to familiarize her with lisp syntax a bit to prime her for programing in the future.
I was between calc (RPN) or lisp (elisp) for their simple syntax. The way I see it LISP's REPL loop is simple enough to teach a kid. And I may be right: after teaching her to verify a two argument operation she got a three argument question. She did:
You can order one through a link on that site, can it be only $23? That's what pcbway.com says. I need a more turnkey approach, someone tell me what to do to get a working board I can just plug in an use. If you ask for "assembly" then it was adding almost $100.
because of the display and low power use, I'd pay somewhere between 75 and $100 for one of them in a plastic case with some easy power supply/connection like maybe a usb plug-in port?
It's such a cool display and keyboard. Another cool thing (that I'd pay for!) is to attach that to a rasberry pi.
The display and keyboard would be fun to have where I interact with the ras pi directly; I don't need to attach another sbc to a ras pi of course; but where is there such a neat display and keyboard that I could get for a pi? I have several rasp pi, I wish they had an inexpensive display and keyboard like this one. I could use it for commands on the shell.
But it's mostly to play with.
That's just a great form factor! In such a situation, I was thinking you could use the cpu to communicate with the ras pi somehow, ssh into it? It's just a neat form factor with that compact keyboard and display, using such little power.
By itself it's fun too, but I'm not going to do much assembly work, not doing anything that takes soldering. I'm just terrible at that kind of stuff. If I could buy a complete little computer like that, with some kind of storage maybe, it would be neat. I didn't understand how much effort it would take to get an actual working system that I could type on like the original poster.
I love this guy. I ran across him trying to self teach about embedded electronics and his site is one of the best I’ve found both for interesting projects and good instructional examples.
"The Lisp Badge LE draws only 6mA from its CR2032 button cell, and so should have a life of about 40 hours"
I suppose that's 6mA when the CPU (MCU here) is active. In idle mode that ought to be much lower (the low power monochrome display, not eInk, draws only 30µA as stated separately). Does uLisp support idle mode? Uh, apparently not automatically, but requires the user to call a SLEEP function ...
I’ve used uLisp via the serial port. In that mode of provides a cool structured Lisp editor (easily navigate sexps). I wonder if the display one here does the same thing.
i love the full keyboard- any time someone says they wouldn't benefit from learning vi bindings because they 'spend more time thinking than typing' i hand them one of these
Yeah, surprised me as well when I was trying different ways of editing text and sometimes code via touch keyboard, vim bindings was the easiest way by far.
Wish someone would build this in a casing etc : especially the 40 hour our on a coin cell. 3d printed should work, but I don’t have time and would just like to buy it complete.
Blackberry-compatible motherboard with appropriate keys and nothing more may be done relatively easy, but where to get drivers for the display and the sensor joystick?
Display and joystick goes on the PCB anyway. Just use what works. Bigger problem is BlackBerry, or anyone to be in their position, won't like that being done at scale.
