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I am slowly descending into madness...or actually color is being drained from my computing devices. Ok, maybe both of these things can be true. In addition to the monochrome (though it's 4-bit grayscale not 1-bit :-P) PDA I use everyday I should soon* finally have my Playdate handheld that uses a 1-bit monochrome sharp memory lcd. But that's not all. A few weeks back SQFMI, the folks behind the Watchy epaper smartwatch (yes I have one of these), unveiled a really neat little pocket computer called the Beepberry that uses the same sharp memory lcd. You can probably guess whether I ordered one. Yes, yes I did.
The Beepberry looks like one of the most interesting and promising pocket computers of the many roughly similar projects of the last few years. It has a number of similarities to the one that kicked off the trend back in 2016, the PocketCHIP. Despite the name the PocketCHIP doesn't fit comfortably into too many pockets. The Beepberry on the other hand is much smaller and more pocket friendly. The PocketCHIP was great fun to play with but had some deficiencies that I think the Beepberry will improve upon. The keyboard, being a blackberry keyboard, should be a better typing experience than the metal domes of the PocketCHIP. The PocketCHIP had an easily accessible socket for the CHIP computer board to plug into and theoretically would enable you to upgrade the internals by plugging future CHIP revisions in there. That never panned out though as there was only ever one version of CHIP compatible with that socket and then the company folded. The Beepberry has a socket for the Raspberry Pi Zero or other SBCs using the same form factor of which there are several. This means that we will have real options in terms of what powers it. One other aspect of the PocketCHIP that many of the similar handheld computer projects have omitted is the easily accessible GPIO breakouts. The Beepberry has those too.
I'm pretty jazzed about the Beepberry. In my parts drawer I have a Pi Zero W awaiting a purpose. I'm as of yet undecided whether I will use that or order one of the other Pi Zero form factor alternatives. The most intriguing one to me currently is the Mango Pi MQ Pro. It sports a RISC-V CPU, 512MB or 1GB of RAM and aligns fairly equally with the Pi Zero W in terms of performance while coming in with even lower power consumption. There are other Pi Zero form factor boards that are more powerful like the Pi Zero 2 W or Radxa Zero but I just don't see that extra power being useful enough in a device like this to be worth the much higher power consumption. For a tiny device with a 1-bit display 1GHz and 512MB should be plenty. One other board possibility was pointed out to me by someone on the fediverse. The ATMegaZero which is an ESP32 microcontroller board in the Pi Zero form factor. It would take more work (and work that's above my head) to make it into something useable but it makes for additional interesting possibilities.
My goal for it when it arrives is to adapt the terminal-based faux-PDA interface that I use on my PineDA (Pinephone PDA) to the smaller 1-bit display. A pocketable and sunlight viewable device with a keyboard that I can run simple terminal apps on sounds pretty great to me. Notes, todos, messaging, etc. If I can get audio out from it then it could make a nice little audio player as well.
Ah yes, the never ending saga of the Playdate. They seem to be doing a good job on the hardware and software fronts but certainly nobody will mistake them for a group that knows how to ship a product remotely on time. Here we are two whole years after they opened pre-orders and my Playdate is still not here. They are so slow that they have to remind people in their emails that they ordered one because it has been so long that you've probably forgotten it exists and that you ordered one X-). I'm in "Group 4" which has just begun shipping and there are some reports of others in this group already receiving theirs. At the beginning of March they announced that group 4 would ship at the start of April and finish by the end of June. It is pretty much the last week of June now and they just STARTED shipping. Right on time! Well done!
On a more positive note there are some REALLY awesome looking games that have been and continue to be released for this weird cool handheld console. There's even a Pocket Planner program that adds PDA style PIM capabilities like todos, calendar, contacts and voice memos. I have a list on itch.io that I've been collecting playdate games on that I intend to try out when I finally get it. There are 110+ games on my list and that's just the ones that looked interesting enough to keep track of! Overall there are 500 games on itch.io, 24 games in season 1 that is included with the playdate plus more that can be found on the playdate catalog or other random places. Quite an impressive game catalog for a system that only has ~30,000 units out in the wild so far.
The watchy is a neat hacker/dev watch project. The epaper display looks awesome and the esp32 brains provide a lot of potential but at this point it is mostly just that. Potential. It's not all that smart of a smartwatch still. You can have custom watchfaces, step counting and weather conditions but that's about it among the daily driver ready firmwares that I've tried. I did look into what was new yesterday and there is one new firmware that sounds a lot more capable than the others. It boasts timers, alarms, weather, NTP sync and a few other features. I'm not sure what state the firmware is in from a usability standpoint but trying it out is on my todo list.
That's all for now. Thanks for reading.
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