a silly little communicator wishlist

[aleteoryx]

I hate smartphones!!!!!!!!! I am a big fan of small and silly electronics but the modern smartphone is a devilspawn consumption machine. it is small and serious and seriously unsilly and seriously EVIL!!!!!!!!!!!!!

for a while I've been thinking about what I'd want out of a smartphone replacement device. a seriously silly tiny portable computer of some kind, with support for all manner of communication peripherals. I'm not a hardware person in the slightest so some of this may be talking out of my ass lol. and obviously this whole list is sort of excessive but that's why it's a wish list and not a send it to the build team, David! list

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I'm envisioning something modular-ish where there's a central computer unit that can talk to a bunch of peripherals over a bus of some kind.

as far as the main body goes, here's what I'd like:

• physical keyboard, full qwerty. but like a nice one that feels good to type on. digital diary type shit
• multi-line text display. 4 rows minimum? but 8 would be nice. ideally this would be an LCD with togglable backlight, but an e-paper screen with some kind of lamp works too. whatever uses the least power and can be had cheaply
• like I said, pluggable architecture. I want it to be as easy as possible to add peripherals to this thing, or replace them. doing this in a way which avoids a lot of custom fabrication will be difficult.
• very low active power draw. ideally the device would be effectively turned off 99% of the time, but 100+ hours of user interaction per-charge would be great. battery life will obviously be hampered by a cell module or some such, and this does not take that into account
• operating system in some kind of minimal high-level environment, like a forth or j2me. this is primarily to facilitate swapping the CPU or other hardware details at any time. a minimal machine code kernel should take care of details like bootstrapping the system, and provide primitives for hardware interaction. the high-level code should not rely on implementation details of the CPU or kernel.
  • following from this, a complete programming environment. once the device is to a point of bare usability, I want to be able to do all OS development on the system itself.
• around 1mb of RAM. I can't imagine honestly needing more for the purposes of this device
• at least 16mb of primary flash storage. this is for user code. the kernel/interpreter will live on an eeprom or some such and boot from this.
• at least 1gb of secondary flash storage. this is primarily for scrollback, and would ideally be user-swappable (CF or SD card?)
• a reasonable amount of weatherproofing
• decent enough audio hardware, and a fast enough bus, to be able to handle voip and cell calls

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and then, the modules themselves!

• the obvious inclusions are bluetooth, wifi, and cell. the reasoning for the second 2 is manifest, the first is primarily for connecting to an earpiece of some kind. after all, this device /will/ do calls.
• lora, specifically for meshtastic purposes. having my own gateway that relays messages from various text protocols over it seems like a good idea, with cell internet and wifi as fallbacks. this is the ideal communication system due to the ultra-low power draw.
• various forms of serial, though this might be better accomplished in software with GPIOs. having the device able to operate as a dumb terminal or UART probe seems extremely handy.
• irda. because i mean. hhghhghgrugnoerungnngnnnnghhhhhh

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so yeah that's it! be interested to hear any additions or comments. I'm probably at least a year out from even beginning to make this thing, but it's nice to write down ideas.

I've been ~aleteoryx, toodles