Re:How I Built a Raspberry Pi Tablet
by girvo on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @01:59AM
(#7055788)
A compliment from Bunnie is something to be proud of! The PiPad looks awesome, well done :) I'm working on a palmtop in the vein of an HP 200LX, running RetroBSD on a PIC32 micro controller. So much fun, but gosh hardware hacking is harder than I thought. New found respect for the hardware people!
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HP 200LX is so neat, so I'm immediately interested in your project. What sort of keypad and display are you planning to use/make? What about case, a 3D-printed one?
Using PIC32 sounds like a challenge, it would be in the same ballpark than the original 200LX performance wise?
RetroBSD is a port of BSD 2.1 for pic micro controllers, so a lot of the work is done for me! I'll be writing drivers for the lcd and key pad. I'm going to be making the keypad from scratch at this point, but performance wise it's actually pretty damned fast!
This is the board I ordered: http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/fubarino-sd-p-1265.html
PIC32MX440F256H - 256K Flash, 32K RAM @ 80MHz 32-bit MIPS core
While the RAM is lacking, it should be enough :) the case will likely be vacuum moulded, I've experience doing that when I use to make portable consoles from hacked SoC's, but the prototype will be 3D printed for sure.
Does RetroBSD really work with only 32K of RAM? Their frontpage just mentions: "RetroBSD needs only 128 kbytes of RAM to be up and running user applications."
Oops, I linked the wrong board!
Fubarino SD chipKIT http://fubarino.org/sd/index.html
Little bit better ;)
It's only for prototyping to be honest, I'm likely to end up wiring up my own PCB with the chips myself, to give me more flexibility in shape and speed, but for now this will do to get it started!
Sweet! That sounds like a really nice project, I'd totally love to see it running!