Seems to me that if this works it would mitigate the voltage issues of trying some of these bogged in solutions, altho I don’t know if the Lyra images that have been produced so far make use of the full size sd cards slot on the picocalc or if there trying to use the Lyra SD card slot so that might be an issue…
I thought I would just point this out and get a second opinion or 2, I’m probably going to pull the trigger on a couple of these and a couple Lyra picos with different flash configs to tinker with because ultimately I really want a handheld low resource wifi enabled ssh client lol, this might be what makes that finally possible, Im still holding out hope for at least a monochrome ssh client for the pico2w but it seems to me that resources are to limited there and a lot of folks are bifurcating there attention to more powerful alternatives for there aspiring application on this well designed picocalc(yes I’m a bit salty at the thrown together and basically abandoned nature of the uconsole, seriously at this price?)
If your primary use case is an ssh client, the PicoCalc with a Lyra in it is actually not a bad choice. At that point it is just a screen, keyboard and wifi connection, RAM and CPU are almost not relevant. As for local use, your mileage will vary, a lot depending on what you want to do. Essentially, this is equivalent to something you have used in the 90’s, which means command line stuff is okay, and you could probably get X running, but I doubt you could do anything useful with it.
That’s exactly what I’m after, go check out my posts on pimeroni forums(theking8713) and that will give you an idea of my level of obsession with scratching this 90s elementary school library dewy decimal system dumb terminal itch lol…
But modern and wifi and secure shell capable and in my hand with a nice backlit keyboard and green on black backlit almost phosphor display…
And no local filesystem or updates or any admining at all, hell I’d even consider an imutable filesystem
Just had a go it configures and makes seemingly without problem but throws three errors at the make install stage which is due, I think, to linking libraries. It may well run fine if these little errors are chased down…
I didn’t get any errors during the build process, but I did have some issues with gpm loading. Without gpm, twin warns you about starting without it. Once in, without a mouse you use the PAUSE key to access the menu, which is problematic since there is no PAUSE key. When I have more time today, I will look into changing the PAUSE key to something else like Alt-F.
I guess the biggest question would be whether it works/can be made to work with a built-in ‘mouse’ or if it could be made to work with an alt-tab style shortcut to switch thru windows, or if it is only useful as a remote terminal thing given how low resolution the screen is. Windowing systems aren’t going to work well with the picocalc no matter how hard we try, unless the whole display gets replaced, and nobody wants to deal with that.
