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Those of you with a Spock-like mind will not be surprised to hear that a new toy has made it to my desk: the Precursor by the most respected Andrew "bunnie" Huang and his gang.
/en/2020/20201225-second-hand-computing.gmi
After a long wait and several not so surprising delays I received my Precursor. A shiny little thing with the formfactor of a smartphone. However, nothing is normal here. The display is small by todays standards, it is a monochrome LCDisplay without illumination[a]. It works fairly well as a mirror, too. Shiny it is. The fonts are black on "white" of sorts, crystal sharp, no hinting, bluring or goddess forbid colored fringes. There's no color involved here. The Precursor doesn't have a CPU. Well, at least not in its initial state. It does have a comfortably sized FPGA (field programmable gate array). This thing will, when "programmed" with what is called a bitstream, feature a small RISC-V RV32IMAC CPU. So it does have a CPU, if you choose to. You don't have to, you could use it as a shiny brick, but then the screen, the keyboard, and all the other interesting components will be bored to death, right? And no, it definitely is not a phone --- no GSM Modem attached. A WLAN chip/antenna is there. And a real jack for a headphone.
This particular setup opens up new possibilities. The creation of the bitstream from sources is done with free software tools. The sources are version controlled and signed by their creator. The synthesized bitstream can be checked against those of other people. They should be the same ones. So there should not be surprises like complete but hidden extra cpu cores or similar. And of course, the little system needs a bunch of software to do anything useful. That's where Xous enters the scene. A little operating system for the new shiny toy, written in Rust, all free software, of course.
There's more: I did sign up for one of the omakase sets. This means, I leave the exact appearance to its creator, a surprise package of sorts. Now that set features another case milled from steel and a bezel with ornaments. Very nice indeed! A screwdriver is included, so there is no excuse to avoid moving the electronics parts to the steel case. There is a nice video showcasing the event.
The only interaction I had with the new toy was admiring it, plugging it in to load the battery. It started, and entering "vibe long" did just that: activate the vibration motor for someting like one second. "sleep now" puts the device back to sleep.
I'm all in awe and a big thank you to bunnie and the gang of dedicated others, who pulled this stunt off!
[a] I found the backlight button in the menu the next day.
The device came with an additional, very shiny steel case and an ornamented bezel. And of course I wanted the steel case just for the show off factor. So after watching the movie on how to do it, I just did it. And I did not break anything along the way. Great! Very shiny, indeed!
And while I was at it, I upgraded to to latest firmware. That's all documented well, I did not run into any niggles. So the upgrade is done, root keys are generated for now, and the PDDB database is formatted.
There is a shellchat application. And yes, it looks much like a contemporary chat application with text bubble left and right, but I'm actually talking to the device. 'vibe long' still does the same thing as yesterday. So off to new adventures ...
https://github.com/betrusted-io/xous-core
