does that mean that every time you hit a key (after the idle timeout) you have to wait 5 seconds for the pi to boot, wasting 5 more precious joules (a minute of active usage battery life at 100mW)

or does the pi zero have a submilliwatt suspend to ram and i'm just the last to know

i think that it could be a fun hacker toy if you put a low-power microcontroller on it with access to the screen and keyboard and control over the pi's power rails (and the rp2040's if you put that in too)

as a bonus if the low-power micro was an esp32 you would have wifi and bluetooth

then you only need to fire up the pi when its computational gronk is really needed, and the ui stays responsive the whole time

2 amp hours (why would you say 'two thousand milliamp hours', that's four extra syllables for no reason) is 27 kilojoules at 3.7 volts; that's ten months at one milliwatt, a weekend at an esp32-like 100 milliwatts, 7 hours at an optimistic one watt, or three hours at 2.5 watts, which i think is more realistic for the pi

you won't even be able to use this thing all night with the pi running; you'll need an external battery to recharge it before the sun comes back up, like that old laptop that you used to take out of the house back when its battery lasted more than two hours

also 2 amp hours is somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 grams of battery, while the rest of the device is i think around 15 grams. admittedly still pretty small and light compared to the fragile monsters that pass for android cellphones nowadays

> does that mean that every time you hit a key (after the idle timeout) you have to wait 5 seconds for the pi to boot, wasting 5 more precious joules (a minute of active usage battery life at 100mW)

Yes, that's exactly the plan. Pi zero does not have suspend to ram unfortunately, hence this elaborate work around. Remember, the use case is a weekend chat device. This power management scheme fits the use case perfectly.

well, i agree that your chat message being delayed for 5 seconds is not critical

but waiting 5 seconds for a keystroke to be echoed (sometimes) is appalling. you would not get permission to do a user study from an irb. it would be denied on the grounds of needless cruelty to experimental subjects

it would fit the use case perfectly if you had a low-power microcontroller that updated the screen in response to keystrokes, but what you're describing is a user interface design botched for no good reason

even the rp2040 would work for that at the weekend level

I think you are misunderstanding the plan. The device will stay on until you turn it off, or 5 mins after last keystroke.

you say 'I think you are misunderstanding the plan. The device will stay on until you turn it off, or 5 mins after last keystroke.'

that's the plan i described yesterday in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35983387

that's the plan i think will give you three hours of battery life: 2 amp hours times 3.7 volts divided by 2.5 watts gives 3 hours of use. 36 5-minute timeouts. do you have a different estimate? did i miscalculate?

that's not a weekend

in that comment i also explained an approach that would beat that by two orders of magnitude if you applied it with the same components (though there i supposed the hardware would use an esp32)

btw my grandparent comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35984332 is upvoted to 11 at the moment so evidently even if you think it's stupid your customers don't

if it doesn’t meet your needs, then don’t buy the device.

You use “customers” as if this were trying to be a full product. This is a weekend hack. Of course there’s going to be low-hanging fruit that could be optimized away.

Stop shitting on the guy’s earnest enjoyment. What you’re doing is akin to going to your favorite package’s issues tracker and making a P0 request like “rewrite it in rust, python sucks”

you seem to have skimmed the previous messages and misunderstood them

it's not a weekend hack, it's a commercial product, designed and built by a team of several people. the weekend hackers are the intended customers, not the makers. they have 50 prototype units in stock, and they're taking preorders for two more larger batches which they expect to ship in august and september. august is 70 days away, an interval which is 35 times larger than a weekend

the 'weekend' aspect is how long the user should expect it to work for, not how long they've spent on developing it

unfortunately, their current design seems to have a fatal flaw that renders it useless for its intended purpose, but one that's easily fixed

my comments are not shitting on it; they explain how to fix it, providing information the original designers were evidently unaware of, so that they can ship a product that fulfills its intended purpose

You've just described a Playdate. It's a game console not a computer but it pretty much is designed how you've suggested. It also uses the same Sharp Memory LCD.

it's the sensible way to design a system around this display, but the playdate isn't what i'm looking for because it doesn't have a keyboard and also it's kind of bulky

I'll have you know my fragile monster of a razer phone 2 has survived being dropped more often than I can count XD

the razer was way lighter and less glass-intensive than currently popular phones

but what's a razer 2

Bro, if you’re taking real money it’s a real product.

Put that caveat somewhere obvious on the site. “I’m not taking this seriously but I will seriously take your money! Caveat emptor!”

It's a kitset, not a finished end user product.

The website shows it with a battery being held on with a rubber band. If you're buying this you should know what you're getting from just a quick look.