wouldn’t it be crazy cool if they made a mix between the PicoCalc and the Uconsole? Think about it you can put the power of a full Linux Kernel CLI/GUI into your pocket almost at the same price! I need your guys opinion on this.
Like this?
https://www.waveshare.com/pocketterm35.htm
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Hackberry Pi would fit this description as well.
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I have been having trouble trying to get my hands on one of these
I need to figure out how to do this becuase I want to have a handheld cyber tool with me
Actually there is project for Pico 2 with PSRAM, they even have fork for linux kernel without PSRAM using Flash XIP feature, but it was dropped in the upstream some time ago.
I have this at home but i havent found any time to build it. As I heard battery life is not good with a PI 5 with the pocket term35. Screen is also dont have much higher resolution as PicoCalc. (640x480) So it is in between Uconsole and PicoCalc but sizewise I think larger than Picocalc. I make some comparision shots If I get to build it.
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PicoCalc has 320x320 and PT35 has 640x480 so it has much better resolution than the Pico IMHO.
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I wonder how difficult this would be to port to the PicoCalc? I have not looked through the code, but I assume like all such things, the shell would be accessed through a serial terminal. I am pretty sure some one could simply build a terminal program that talks to Linux through a virtual serial port.
I did something similar with the KEK PDP-11 emulator, of course this was much easier because I could run the emulator on Core 0 and the terminal on Core 1. I am not sure this is an option with the RISC-V processor.
It can use the plain framebuffer driver AFAIK and spi display driver to output, so should work for output on PicoCalc, i2c custom keyboard driver is needed but it easy to port it.
I looked into this, and the project you linked to depends on there being access to PSRAM. The project itself was built for a SparkFun Pro Micro RP2350. The PicoCalc PSRAM is not wired up for this kind of use. Without the PSRAM, there would not be enough memory left over to do anything useful. If you swap in a board with the correct PSRAM, you might as well go for the Luckfox Lyra instead, that lets you run Ubuntu with 100MB of RAM to work with. I ran into the same problem with the kek PDP-11 emulator, once everything was said and done, I only had about 64K of memory for Unix 5 to run programs. This an interesting thought experiment, but I don’t think it is viable as a working project. If you have an idea about how to make it work, I’d be willing to listen.
I ended up trying this and although the screen and resolution is nice and you get the full linux experience right out of the box, I much prefer the keyboard on the picocalc. The pocketterm keyboard is terrible for typing quickly.
Okay, I was entirely wrong, I was actually able to get this stuffed into the PicoCalc’s PSRAM;
I only have it running on serial console right now, I have a bit more than 3MB of RAM to play with after a very stripped down kernel is loaded. Oh and it is really bloody slow, I would not consider this to be particularly usable idea, but if someone is interested in taking it up, I will share what I have.
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