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.

My own humble e-paper projects:

https://www.asciimx.com/projects/e-reader/ https://www.asciimx.com/projects/etlas/

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.

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.

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:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-golden-age-of-hp-palmtop-pcs

> solar power

Tangential, but what happened to Intel Claremont, the solar-powered CPU? Did this project go anywhere or was it only a tech demo?

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).

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.

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.

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. https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/epaper-1/...

which is just cheap enough that I could see myself risking buying it without being sure that it will work with my other choices.

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.

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.

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.

To save others doing what I did there is an Android tablet like this called 'Daylight'

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43098318

Man, I want this, but IBM AT level, 32-bits with at least a 386 and 8MB of RAM.

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.

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.

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.

>100+ hours of battery life

you will spend 99 of those hours waiting for screen refresh (1/second).

I love the idea of a full-size keyboard slate devices. The DevTerm is almost there, but my ideal would be the size of a TRS-80 model 100.

> Note: if some videos won't play in Firefox, please try using Chrome.

No thanks.

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.

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.

Can you make one that emulates a PowerBook 100?

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."

https://www.good-display.com/news/80.html

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.

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.

There's a bit more latency than I'd like with the typing. Though maybe that could be fixed on eink with partial updates?

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...

Most people sell or give away fully functional, very powerful mobile phones, because of the end of the software support.

Hardware is more than capable for a long time, and is often very durable. But it takes a special kind of audience to put up with decade-old unsupported software, let alone with IBM XT-level software (which I remember using).

Security is not a consideration for such devices, because of their very limited number. Nobody is going to crack into your internet-connected Amiga except maybe some of your friends, as a prank. But a forever-device used for something substantial, something touching money in any way, would have to be much more up-to-date.

I agree! Ten years ago, we had netbooks with adequate performance for many tasks, and battery life of 10+ hours. Given the advances in CPUs since then, we should be able to pack similar performance onto much smaller CPUs, using much less power. Screens have also advanced since then.

Where are the super thin and light laptops that allow me to write emails, do light coding and browsing and SSH into other devices with 50 hours of battery life?

On that note, whatever happened to netbooks? As someone who writes a lot and need a mobile device to do it on, they used to be perfect. Can't seem to find the form factor anymore. Even the smallest Chromebook seems only slightly smaller than a laptop.

There are a few commercial products popping up and marketing. I think youll find what you find here interesting: https://old.reddit.com/r/writerDeck/ Im using a Boox palma 2 on a stand, and a Thinkpad Keyboard 2 to emulate the same thing. The battery life may not be 100 hours but considerable.

> Low power but forever devices that have some basic functionality.

like paper? :D

Ideal for any kind of outside jobs, including for taking restaurant orders on a sunny patio.

With a stylus and hand writing recognition, the waiter wouldn't have to walk through a selection tree, but instead simply write the order like it was a traditional piece of paper.

There is a community of people that have been making "writer-decks". It might be similar to what you are describing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/writerDeck/

> Low power but forever devices that have some basic functionality

Just jailbreak your eink Kindle?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43073969

Low power consumption. slap a small set of solar panels on there like Garmin watches, and possibly add a wireless power generator. I could see a device like that having standby battery measured in years.

I'm the guy who built this. I use the windows key to open up the run-time settings menu where you can do things like mount floppy disk images, turn on or off different emulated sound cards (adlib, DSS, covox, midi), switch keyboard layouts, change CPU speed, hibernate, etc. Or long pressing the windows key inverts the pixels. Usually a white background with black text looks a lot better than the reverse, but some programs default to the reverse, so it's nice to have a quick way to re-reverse it. Similarly, I use the "menu" key to the right of the space bar to do a quick refresh of the screen (which redraws all the black pixels making sure they're totally black, in case occasionally some look a little washed out -- rare problem but nice to have a quick solution), or long press to do a long refresh of the screen (where it actually turns all black and then restores the image, which takes about a full second) which makes all the blacks totally black and all the whites totally white. Neither of these refresh functions need to be used very often, maybe once every two or three hours you'll see a situation where you want to use one.

They keyboard is not from a laptop. It's a stand-alone PS/2 keyboard that I removed from its original enclosure and installed in the 3d printed enclosure for this computer. I get them from https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=561534245819&skuId=52612... (the "KJW240/10寸PS/2圆口（线长140cm" option). I cut the cord down to about 35cm, since the original cords are way too long, and crimp on a PH2.0 plug which plugs into the motherboard internally. Don't know whether or not you can buy this keyboard outside China. Maybe it's sold on AliExpress too. I tried out a lot of different keyboards before choosing this one. My criteria was pretty hard to meet: must have windows and menu keys, must have left and right shift keys (some keyboards actually don't have a right shift key!), must have both delete and backspace keys (some keyboards don't have a delete key), must have print screen scroll lock, numlock, number keypad (activated by numlock), pause/break, insert keys. Not many miniature modern keyboards actually have all those. It had to be small enough to fit on this computer but big enough to be able to type on fairly naturally. And it had to have pretty low power consumption. This keyboard takes about 6-7mA. Many keyboards I tried took between 30-40mA, more than the CPU itself. The thing I dislike most about this keyboard is the home key being between the quote and enter keys, and the up arrow key being where the right shift key should be. That's a really unfortunate design problem. But its a lot better than a lot of keyboards, and its something I was able to get pretty used to after a few days of typing. Still, I do plan to build my own keyboard to replace this in the future, one with a processor that sleeps between keystrokes so it can consume less than 1mA on average, and that has a standard key layout.

Since you can also plug in a PS/2 keyboard of your choice on the right side of the device, I had to consider the situation where someone plugs in an older keyboard that doesn't have the windows and menu keys. In that case they can use the F11 key to replace the windows key, and the F12 key to replace the menu key, as these two keys were not present on many keyboards and not used by software from the DOS era either.

Intel makes the quark which is like a 486dx that runs on a watch battery. There are a few models now, but I think that qualifies?

It's called a TrackPoint. ;-)

I don't know if you've seen the videos, but the latency from input to result on the screen is, very, very bad. I don't think this is actually what you want.

We all want low-power retro computing but expect reasonable latency in usage. We also want WIFI working in every room and e-ink that doesn't suck and doesn't cost half a car... And the ability to browse the web (HTTPS). It's just not there yet.

When someone will make a product this good with all of the modern life "requirements", that will be a vastly successful product I imagine.

This is basically the HP 200LX on steroids.