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ChipMusic.org / Forums / Other Vintage Computers & Consoles / " The Humane Reader: A $20 'computer' "
I saw this and it had the phrase "8-bit" in it, so I automatically reacted by posted it here.
But actually, it's still in the preproduction phase from what I can gather, and I'm not entirely certain of it's sound/video capabilities, but it's a piece of hardware designed to be hackable. I thought this might be of interest, and maybe some of you might wanna keep an eye on this.
ATMega can't run code from RAM, only from built-in Flash memory, so any AVR-based computer is rather limited, you can only use preprogrammed code or use some interpreter for loadable programs (which is slow, and best perfomance with native code is ~20MIPS). With native code one ATMega has enough resources to emulate AY-3-8910, or SID (with limitations), or play 4-channel MODs.
And I don't think there is any sound hardware. So it is may be easier to design own system than hack this.
Last edited by Shiru (Jul 21, 2010 8:00 am)
Yeah it probably is poop, but I'm pretty sure there is sound hardware. I wouldn't really be one to argue with anyone about this though so I'll take your word for it.
As long as it can be used to read plain text (and jump through hyper text) I think that it might be valuable to some poor people - especially if you can cut out enough 10 page articles on anime characters from Wikipedia to fit the rest on an SD card less expensive than the computer 
. Having access to a lot of information on a slow computer is better than not having any access at all.
Chances are that it won't be more than an interesting curiosity for computer enthusiasts, like the OLPC.
I personally think that uber-cheap low-end computing could be a great thing in the future but there needs to be some network infrastructure changes. TCP/IP is, for the majority of people, far too much than is really needed. It's like using an elephant to transport a flea. Devices like this with an efficient network transfer protocol for fast and efficient text mode send and receive would allow the rest of the world to have access to computing.
Now- if one could put the entire textual contents of wikipedia onboard and then make it into a handheld I'd buy one. In fact, if there is a good place to obtain such text (or a good script to do it with) then I'd build myself something like this for the sheer utility of such a thing. PSOne screen + mini keyboard + Humane Reader = Awesome. In fact, it takes VT52 control codes, so it'd make a decent portable serial terminal too.
Now, the only way this would be more awesome would be built in Basic or a built in assembler and support for an 80 column text mode.
I say put a forth environment on it and let the third world people become the software engineers of tomorrow!
Or fortran, and they can do advanced computations for, say, crystallographic structure determination. Haha, I doubt an 8-bit processor wouldn't even pull 1 VAX unit of processing power for that kind of thing. 
Last edited by arfink (Jul 21, 2010 9:09 pm)
Now- if one could put the entire textual contents of wikipedia onboard and then make it into a handheld I'd buy one. In fact, if there is a good place to obtain such text (or a good script to do it with) then I'd build myself something like this for the sheer utility of such a thing.
is this what you are looking for? http://encyclopodia.sourceforge.net/en/index.html
Nice, but I want a keyboard and a more readable size display, so no ipod-wiki for me. However, reverse-engineering those ebook files could be useful.
Oh by the way, the header which calls this a "computer" in quotes is misleading. This is a 100% Turing complete computer. It even goes beyond the Turing definition of computer to include keyboard input (instead of just register switches) as well as readable text output, a fully programmable tri-CPU design, and onboard storage to the tune of 4 gigabytes maximum. The tools used to code the device are even open source.
Lastly, I looked through the design files, and this thing can do PWM sound, and potentially much more than that with some clever programming. The USB device control CPU could be re-programmed for sound generation or any number of things. It's intended to be used as a reprogrammable co-processor.
EDIT 2: I also looked through the bill of materials (which is quite small) and a presentation which the designer(s) made to a group of Unix geeks a short while ago, and it seems that even with a pitifully small volume of production (100 units) the cost per-unit minus the cost of enclosure and SD card is a paltry $25. With 10k units it would cost a little under $15. It's amazing to me how inexpensive this could be. Compared to an Apple II+ (which sold for $1200 with no floppy drive or monitor!), which is the closest thing I can think of to compare it to, (in terms of the user-perceived output) it has 48 times the CPU power, quadruple the RAM, and literally thousands of times more storage space. I know that (probably) Steve Wozniak would have killed his own grandmother for computational muscle like that back in the day.
Last edited by arfink (Jul 21, 2010 9:25 pm)
Apple II+ had 48K RAM for loadable programs. This thing has 32K of Flash inside the MCU for all the programs, the code can't run from RAM, and you can't reflash it too often (resource is 10K times). It also has only 2K of RAM per MCU, external RAM is much slower. As personal computer it is actually inferior even to Apple II+. That's because MCU's aren't designed for building general-purpose computers, they are for embedded devices (like this thing in unhacked form). I think, they simply choose wrong HW for the device, there are a lot of better solutions in the same price range. I also can understand why they choose AVR, it is good thing for learning and education, and widely used for this.
Yeah, the AVR is being used because it's targeting the Arduino crowd of course. And yes, for general use, it's got all the normal drawbacks of a microcontroller, but it's cheap enough that flash breakdown wouldn't be a terrible thing.
Now, this design has some flaws from a general-use-computer standpoint, but I also think that using 3 AVRs in one design is maybe a bit extreme. However, as a learning device and a cheap plaything (which is what it would be to me) it looks quite promising. However, if you can show me a new design for a general purpose computer which costs $20 minus file storage, PSU, keyboard, and video display, I will be immensely impressed. I think that the low cost of the design is pretty dependent upon the use of an MCU.
I don't know any ready-made design, so I judge by prices only. The cheapest ATMega328p (8-bit MCU) I've found is $4 (for large quantifies), so $12 total. The cheapest LPC2138 I've found is $7.5 (for large quantifies), it is ARM7 (32-bit MCU) with 512K Flash, 32K RAM and 52MIPS - much better. You can even add one ATMega328p for video generation/USB, if you don't want to load main CPU with all this stuff, and still it will be the same price.
Yeah, what's done with the three ATMegas could easily be done with a single Propeller chip, and those go $5.99 in quantity. That's 8 32 bit cores, and modular code for video/audio output, input, BASIC, Forth, etc. already exists, not to mention a built-in font! Should save some CB space too, cutting the cost further.
Last edited by boomlinde (Jul 21, 2010 11:13 pm)