On a recent project I played around with some SoCs that could do something like this.
I wound up using a Renesas RZ/A1L, it's an ARM-A9 core with 3MB of SRAM on the die. You attach it to an inexpensive quad-lane SPI NOR flash part and it will boot Linux with just those two parts. The flash serves as a filesystem and I believe you can also XIP the kernel off the NOR part if you choose.
We even ran Qt on it with an XGA LCD and it was poky but it worked. It could probably do what you're looking to do.
https://www.renesas.com/us/en/doc/products/mpumcu/doc/rz/r01...
That's probably the lowest-end part I'd say would work for something like this. You can run Linux off a cheaper Cortex-M with some amount of work, but it's not pleasant. The iMXRT1050 does look interesting, though.
Re:Linux on an 8-Bit Micro? (2012)
by jodrellblank on Saturday April 27, 2019 @05:55AM
(#19764762)
Stack batteries on the back of a jailbroken Kindle 3G running Debian? Not sure how far you'll get with power management on it. Or using it.
Re:Linux on an 8-Bit Micro? (2012)
by IgorPartola on Saturday April 27, 2019 @09:02AM
(#19765291)
Just curious, what would you use vim for on a device like that? Presumably it won’t be able to do much beyond what you outlined so unless you plan on using it as just a not taking device/typewriter, why not just have an embedded ssh client with tmux?
Pretty much just what you said - when offline, it's just a fancy typewriter that I can also run a simple shell script or two on.
I guess it also needs an e-ink screen, otherwise the screen would still draw a lot of the power.
Re:Linux on an 8-Bit Micro? (2012)
by IgorPartola on Saturday April 27, 2019 @08:36AM
(#19765208)
How fast are eInk displays nowadays? Like what kind of refresh rate are we looking at?
Not much more than a few Hertz, AFAICT. It should be enough to use a terminal - someone even installed X and ran XFCE on a Kindle, but it looks pretty weird.
Re:Linux on an 8-Bit Micro? (2012)
by dkudriavtsev on Monday April 29, 2019 @05:54AM
(#19777038)
They actually run X by default. They use the Awesome window manager.
Re:Linux on an 8-Bit Micro? (2012)
by quickthrower2 on Saturday April 27, 2019 @05:27AM
(#19764684)
I've been messing around with an Arduino this week to make my own IoT device. It has enough power to negotiate a https connection, so presumably it could run SSH and Vim. I think they are very efficient in terms of power usage.
There's the Vocore2. Five volts, 74ma draw when idle. https://vocore.io/v2.html
No video though.
I wonder if one could achieve like a month of battery life for such a glorified typewriter/thin client.