[Abe] wanted the perfect portable computer. He has a DevTerm, but it didn’t quite fit his needs. This is Hackaday after all, so he loaded up his favorite CAD software and started designing. The obvious choice here would be a Raspberry Pi. But [Abe] didn’t want to drop in a Linux computer — he was going for something a bit smaller.
An RP2040 Pico would be a perfect fit. Driving a display with the Pico can be eat a lot of resources though. The solution was a PicoVision from Pimoroni. PicoVision uses two RP2040 chips. One drives an HDMI port, while the other is free to run application software. This meant a standard HDMI screen could be used.
The keyboard was a bit harder. After a lot of searching, [Abe] found an IR remote designed for smart TVs. The QWERTY keyboard was the perfect size but didn’t have an interface he could use. He fixed that with an adapter PCB including an I2C GPIO expander chip. A bit of I2C driver software later, and he had a working input keyboard.
Hardware doesn’t do anything without software though. The software running on the handheld is called Slime OS, and the source is available at [Abe’s] GitHub. It’s a launcher, with support for applications written in python. [Abe] has a few basic demos working, but he’s looking for help to get more features up and running.
Although it wasn’t quite what [Abe] was after, our own [Donald Papp] came away fairly impressed when he gave the DevTerm a test drive back in 2022. Something to consider if you’re looking for a Linux handheld and not quite ready to build one yourself.
Everything about this is great. The slimeos project confuses me a bit though. Pico’s don’t have a lot of resources how are they running python? Or is it micro python?
Either way I love the keyboard and layout
Looking at the github project, MicroPython is mentioned.
I liked the ancient PDAs that ran for days on a set of batteries. Other than that, I didn’t like them because there was jack s**t you could actually do with them. Typing in BASIC code for a simple text based blackjack game was entertaining for about an hour. The game itself, not very much.
If we had a sort of retro-future now where we’d be using these pocket calculator sized devices with a 16×4 LCD and 2-4 kB of RAM, possibly an add-on thermal printer and a cassette drive for a dock, what would you use them for? Other than the obvious text message/email terminal?
Me too, I’m wondering what his needs are. I would probably just connect a Bluetooth keyboard to my smartphone. It doesn’t need to boot and it has two day of battery life and I don’t have to write its OS and applications all by myself. But that wouldn’t be a hack. Kudos for the work, but I doubt its usefulness.
Youre smartphone surely needs to boot?
Or does it start in 4sec?
Unless you keep it on all the time like you do with a phone.
I started typing a comment with my thoughts on this but it was so long I decided to make it as a page on my HaD.io profile, which can be read here: https://hackaday.io/page/399320-portable-personal-hardware
But tl;dr… Why and what for this device? Probably a natural reaction to the iron grip google and apple have on portable personal devices, so hackers and makers feel compelled to create some sort of device that is open source, without any creepys built into hardware or software.
We are years away from these devices having the functions current smartphones do, but I think all these MCU based dev consoles and raspberry pi cyberdecks are a step in the right direction. Even if the device has little to no real world purpose, it gets people thinking about creating their own hardware devices and software to run on them.