I find it delightful that you ported a hacking simulator to a device so well suited for actual cracking, like a love letter to the practice itself. I enjoyed reading the article.
Did you manage to find anything to do with the R-01? The idea of switching architectures as easily as other computers switch hard drives makes me salivate, but I haven’t seen any single practical task that is fulfilled better by the R-01 than by the CM4. I want RISC-V, but I also want to be able to continue visiting this forum.
It may be too early to tell if this device will be well-supported by the community. The Linux drivers it needs aren’t mainline and look a little annoying to bring over to each kernel version. Nobody has an operating system besides Linux running on a uConsole (though, to be fair, OpenBSD is lousy on a CM4, NetBSD doesn’t support hardware video decoding, and 9front wouldn’t accept input even when I got it to boot on here, so it would be an uphill struggle without much reward). I have yet to see a commercially available mainboard or battery board replacement either, though we are very close. Spare parts are only available by request to ClockworkPi. None of these are dealbreakers whatsoever and personally I never really run into them, but I am a little worried about how I’ll manage to keep this thing running until I die or a better replacement comes out.
Thank you for the kind words, I appreciate it! That was indeed the idea, I just loved the aesthetic of running a hacking simulator on such a device.
No, I haven’t really found a great application for the R-01. I could see it being quite useful as a terminal-only machine, or if all you wanna do is SSH into something. It can work well there. But even the diminutive CM3 I am using is so much more powerful, being able to use an actual browser makes a huge difference.
As for support in the future, I’m optimistic! Electronics like these don’t really ‘break’ over time - I haven’t seen any electrolytic capacitors that could expire on these boards. And I think that there are enough of these around for spare parts, if you’re willing to buy a few of them.
And old Linux is still Linux, a great operating system. I’ve worked plenty with older kernels in my job and it doesn’t make a massive difference. Sure, there will be limitations, but I’d be perfectly happy to always use Debian Trixie on my uConsole.