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Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life

566 points| harryvederci | 10 months ago |github.com

194 comments

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ericjenott|10 months ago

Actually 100 hours is an understatement. It'll go at least 200 hours of constant active use on a single charge, even if you don't use power saving mode, and can easily get 500 hours or a lot more using power saving mode.

kovac|10 months ago

Love it! Any idea how long the display can last? I've been playing around with e-paper (nothing as impressive as this!) dashboards. I use Waveshare displays that has a max of 1 million refresh cycles. The display you've used seems more capable.

My own humble e-paper projects:

https://www.asciimx.com/projects/e-reader/ https://www.asciimx.com/projects/etlas/

ericjenott|10 months ago

Hi, I'm Eric, Evertop's creator. The screen has a refresh rate of about 350ms, or almost 3 times per second. Of course the device is smart enough to not refresh the screen unless there's a change in displayed content, so it's not like it's actually always refreshing 3 times per second. I've been using the same screen for probably an average of 1-2 hours per day for a little over two years, and can see little or no difference in the clarity of the text and graphics as compared to a brand new screen.

codebje|10 months ago

It's probably https://www.good-display.com/product/440.html which is also 1mil refresh cycles and a fast refresh time of 1.5sec - around 185 hours of screen updates, so ~3 months of 5hrs a day typing or a few years of e-reader style usage.

I can't really see a device like this getting used super heavily every day, so expecting it to still be usable from time to time for a few years seems reasonable to me.

jmward01|10 months ago

I think there is a class of device here that is missing. Low power but forever devices that have some basic functionality. Over time I could see this taking over laptops and the like as ultra-low-power became more and more capable.

nine_k|10 months ago

Most people sell or give away fully functional, very powerful mobile phones, because of the end of the software support.

Hardware is more than capable for a long time, and is often very durable. But it takes a special kind of audience to put up with decade-old unsupported software, let alone with IBM XT-level software (which I remember using).

Security is not a consideration for such devices, because of their very limited number. Nobody is going to crack into your internet-connected Amiga except maybe some of your friends, as a prank. But a forever-device used for something substantial, something touching money in any way, would have to be much more up-to-date.

patapong|10 months ago

I agree! Ten years ago, we had netbooks with adequate performance for many tasks, and battery life of 10+ hours. Given the advances in CPUs since then, we should be able to pack similar performance onto much smaller CPUs, using much less power. Screens have also advanced since then.

Where are the super thin and light laptops that allow me to write emails, do light coding and browsing and SSH into other devices with 50 hours of battery life?

hliyan|10 months ago

On that note, whatever happened to netbooks? As someone who writes a lot and need a mobile device to do it on, they used to be perfect. Can't seem to find the form factor anymore. Even the smallest Chromebook seems only slightly smaller than a laptop.

ct0|10 months ago

There are a few commercial products popping up and marketing. I think youll find what you find here interesting: https://old.reddit.com/r/writerDeck/ Im using a Boox palma 2 on a stand, and a Thinkpad Keyboard 2 to emulate the same thing. The battery life may not be 100 hours but considerable.

chii|10 months ago

> Low power but forever devices that have some basic functionality.

like paper? :D

carlosjobim|10 months ago

Ideal for any kind of outside jobs, including for taking restaurant orders on a sunny patio.

With a stylus and hand writing recognition, the waiter wouldn't have to walk through a selection tree, but instead simply write the order like it was a traditional piece of paper.

chneu|10 months ago

Low power consumption. slap a small set of solar panels on there like Garmin watches, and possibly add a wireless power generator. I could see a device like that having standby battery measured in years.

userbinator|10 months ago

This is running under emulation, but I wonder if the power savings would be even more (an order of magnitude?) if the hardware was "gate accurate" to the original but shrunken down to a modern CMOS process.

I find it amusing that the keyboard has a Windows key. Does anyone recognise what laptop it was originally from? It can't be a Thinkpad since there's no pointing stick, and I seem to remember some early Dells having a similar odd layout, but it's definitely an older one given the keys aren't islands. Odd placement of home/end and that right shift key aside, that actually looks better than most if not all laptop keyboards today (ins/del/home/end aren't Fn'd, and there's full-size arrow keys!)

ericjenott|10 months ago

I'm the guy who built this. I use the windows key to open up the run-time settings menu where you can do things like mount floppy disk images, turn on or off different emulated sound cards (adlib, DSS, covox, midi), switch keyboard layouts, change CPU speed, hibernate, etc. Or long pressing the windows key inverts the pixels. Usually a white background with black text looks a lot better than the reverse, but some programs default to the reverse, so it's nice to have a quick way to re-reverse it. Similarly, I use the "menu" key to the right of the space bar to do a quick refresh of the screen (which redraws all the black pixels making sure they're totally black, in case occasionally some look a little washed out -- rare problem but nice to have a quick solution), or long press to do a long refresh of the screen (where it actually turns all black and then restores the image, which takes about a full second) which makes all the blacks totally black and all the whites totally white. Neither of these refresh functions need to be used very often, maybe once every two or three hours you'll see a situation where you want to use one.

They keyboard is not from a laptop. It's a stand-alone PS/2 keyboard that I removed from its original enclosure and installed in the 3d printed enclosure for this computer. I get them from https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=561534245819&skuId=52612... (the "KJW240/10寸PS/2圆口(线长140cm" option). I cut the cord down to about 35cm, since the original cords are way too long, and crimp on a PH2.0 plug which plugs into the motherboard internally. Don't know whether or not you can buy this keyboard outside China. Maybe it's sold on AliExpress too. I tried out a lot of different keyboards before choosing this one. My criteria was pretty hard to meet: must have windows and menu keys, must have left and right shift keys (some keyboards actually don't have a right shift key!), must have both delete and backspace keys (some keyboards don't have a delete key), must have print screen scroll lock, numlock, number keypad (activated by numlock), pause/break, insert keys. Not many miniature modern keyboards actually have all those. It had to be small enough to fit on this computer but big enough to be able to type on fairly naturally. And it had to have pretty low power consumption. This keyboard takes about 6-7mA. Many keyboards I tried took between 30-40mA, more than the CPU itself. The thing I dislike most about this keyboard is the home key being between the quote and enter keys, and the up arrow key being where the right shift key should be. That's a really unfortunate design problem. But its a lot better than a lot of keyboards, and its something I was able to get pretty used to after a few days of typing. Still, I do plan to build my own keyboard to replace this in the future, one with a processor that sleeps between keystrokes so it can consume less than 1mA on average, and that has a standard key layout.

Since you can also plug in a PS/2 keyboard of your choice on the right side of the device, I had to consider the situation where someone plugs in an older keyboard that doesn't have the windows and menu keys. In that case they can use the F11 key to replace the windows key, and the F12 key to replace the menu key, as these two keys were not present on many keyboards and not used by software from the DOS era either.

genewitch|10 months ago

Intel makes the quark which is like a 486dx that runs on a watch battery. There are a few models now, but I think that qualifies?

31337Logic|10 months ago

It's called a TrackPoint. ;-)

kstrauser|10 months ago

Take my money.

No, really, this is precisely the sort of thing I've wanted for ages, and I don't have the time or resources to build it myself.

keyle|10 months ago

I don't know if you've seen the videos, but the latency from input to result on the screen is, very, very bad. I don't think this is actually what you want.

We all want low-power retro computing but expect reasonable latency in usage. We also want WIFI working in every room and e-ink that doesn't suck and doesn't cost half a car... And the ability to browse the web (HTTPS). It's just not there yet.

When someone will make a product this good with all of the modern life "requirements", that will be a vastly successful product I imagine.

bombcar|10 months ago

This is basically the HP 200LX on steroids.

sedatk|10 months ago

Not an XT clone per se. XT had 8088 CPU, CGA/Hercules display adapter, and a 640KB RAM with a PC speaker. This one has 80186 and 1MB RAM with MCGA (VGA) and Adlib emulation too. It's better than an XT.

ericjenott|10 months ago

It is an "XT clone" in the sense that the term was used back in the 1980s. In that era, there were a whole bunch of "IBM PC clones" "IBM XT clones" "IBM AT clones", all different in some ways than the original IBM brand computers from which they "cloned", but, at least in theory, all providing compatibility with at least all the features of their namesakes, and usually some additional features or performance improvements as well. Including XT clones with V20, V30, and 80186 processors. So in this "traditional" sense, this is indeed an "XT clone", in that it will run all the software that would run on an XT, plus it has many additional features as well. Likewise, I can't call it an "AT clone", because it can't run all the software that an AT could run.

rubyfan|10 months ago

I was thinking the same thing when I saw 80186 and the display.

I had an XT in high school and used to hit up the BBSs at 2400 baud watching each character light up on my green monochrome display. It was glorious!

nine_k|10 months ago

It's some XT++, but it's below the AT specs. That's the material difference.

It also sort of sets the expectations for the sloooow screen.

pinewurst|10 months ago

This one has ESP32 just running 80186 emulator.

xattt|10 months ago

> solar power

Tangential, but what happened to Intel Claremont, the solar-powered CPU? Did this project go anywhere or was it only a tech demo?

JoelMcCracken|10 months ago

I use my boox max lumi as a secondary display daily for working in emacs. The eink is great for text/terminal use, the only issue I have is when i sometimes need to do any kind of mouse work (which, is basically never, when I use it for what I said above).

What I really want is a low power linux laptop that is not entirely without CPU/memory power, so I can program some simple things on it. I don't mind if it has _less_ power, I can use ssh for anything that is overly cpu-hungry.

Ive seen several devices that seem like they might suit my need, but I look at them for long enough and just won't pull the trigger. Either it seems overly much like a walled garden (like, I can program on the device, but it doesn't seem like a suitable spot to write blog posts in emacs for my blog or whatever), or its just too underpowered and I'm sure that 99% of the tools I use already won't work on it.

I wish I had the EE knowledge/confidence to start hacking on this kind of thing. I think its very doable; I was just looking at e.g. https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper/epaper-1/...

which is just cheap enough that I could see myself risking buying it without being sure that it will work with my other choices.

Nowadays, I feel like I should be able to run most of what I want on an android device that is built for power, and it should have a fairly long lasting battery because of its design; attach a trackpad, keyboard, and eink display, and my perfect device is here. I don't care if its not the thinnest device in the universe, a swappable battery (or, just load the thing with extra batteries) plus perhaps a portable solar charger would be amazing.

tomrod|10 months ago

Pretty dang cool. Well done.

My ideal setup before eyeing the e-ink space was a linux-based netbook and occasional internet access to offload heavy compute to powerful servers. I could see using this sort of setup in a similar fashion.

anthk|10 months ago

I still use an n270 with OpenBSD, cwm, uxterm, mupdf and a bunch of cli/tui tools.

knowitnone|10 months ago

Chromebook with linux installed?

d3Xt3r|10 months ago

This is awesome, only wish it was a 486DX2 with 4/8MB RAM instead, that would increase the possibilities of running more heavier operating systems, like Windows 95.

Also, is there a mention of the refresh rate of the display? I wonder what gaming on it would be like. They provided a screenshot of Test Drive and Wolf3D running on it, but a video would've been nicer.

mulmen|10 months ago

> Also, is there a mention of the refresh rate of the display? I wonder what gaming on it would be like. They provided a screenshot of Test Drive and Wolf3D running on it, but a video would've been nicer.

There's a 2:30 video of Wolfenstein 3D gameplay on the linked README page.

billyjmc|10 months ago

There’s a video, too, but the framerate wasn’t usefully playable. I’ve seen worse, but you wouldn’t ever want to play it this way.

sien|10 months ago

The idea of a laptop with an e-ink display running Linux and having days of battery life is really interesting.

To save others doing what I did there is an Android tablet like this called 'Daylight'

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43098318

fractallyte|10 months ago

There's also the MobiScribe Wave (https://mobiscribe.com/), a color e-ink Android tablet, with frontlighting, and excellent battery life. On standby, it lasts for weeks. I have it hooked up to my Bluetooth keyboard. It runs emacs, a web browser, and email client - plus all the usual e-reader apps.

(Yes, I'm aware there are several other Android e-readers. The Wave has the unique combination of top-end handwriting functionality with waterproofing.)

aftergibson|10 months ago

I think the closest thing I've gotten to the Linux + E-Ink dream(for me at least) is the Pinenote with a bluetooth keyboard. It's been a surprisingly enjoyable portable device(nice wireless keyboard doesn't hurt either) and it's powerful enough to do some nice simple stuff, then disconnect they keyboard and it's back to being an book/newsfeed reader.

actionfromafar|10 months ago

It would be really neat if the emulator had some kind of "escape mode" where it could jump to and run the native instruction set.

It could even be implemented to look like some kind of extension card in RAM. You write native instructions to a piece of RAM and call a special (otherwise invalid) 8086 instruction and the native execution kicks in.

Or if you want to make it more ambitious, create a COM or EXE format which indicates that the instructions are really ESP32 native, but with full access to the BIOS functions with some kind of translation layer.

fuzunoglu|10 months ago

Powered by ESP32, which reportedly uses archaic 40nm technology. Aren't there some good ARM microprocessors built with 5nm technology, which would consume comparable power?

cestith|10 months ago

The brand new rp2350 from Raspberry Pi is also made on 40nm. Microcontrollers are often on 40nm or 32nm processes, but those processes didn’t stop being updated twenty years ago.

vaylian|10 months ago

This makes me wonder: Are there any solar-powered navigation computers? It would be cool to have an off-grid navigation computer that can load all openstreetmap tiles.

et-al|10 months ago

The Garmin 540/840/1040 bike computers have a solar option but it’s not sufficient to completely power the device. It just slows the drain by a few points.

rasz|10 months ago

>100+ hours of battery life

you will spend 99 of those hours waiting for screen refresh (1/second).

rbanffy|10 months ago

I love the idea of a full-size keyboard slate devices. The DevTerm is almost there, but my ideal would be the size of a TRS-80 model 100.

nottorp|10 months ago

> Note: if some videos won't play in Firefox, please try using Chrome.

No thanks.

Ringz|10 months ago

Exactly my thought. The same answer goes for new plugins developed only for Chrome.

imhoguy|10 months ago

Thankfully plays on Firefox, but doesn't in Chrome on Android.

ggm|10 months ago

3 decades ago I did upgrade logistics for NMR labs using HP and Nixdorf based backends to run the machines. What amazed me was how the HP gui was X10. pre X10R4. They decided "good enough" and commercialised a species of interface with a trackball and keyboard, which at least in terms of GUI styling was 1:1 congruent with X10R1 as I saw it in 85 or so. I continue to notice this interface on Ultrasound and like, I guess having coded the FPGAs to work, they just stopped changing it.

It wouldn't surprise me if XT was similar. I remember doing a pre-purchase review of DirecTV and the sat management was OS/2, long long after it was deprecated. Same behaviour in aerospace: keep the tech which works. This is why German armed forces were recently commissioning USB compatible SD type storage with insanely huge plugs, and slow interfaces, to replace 8" and 5.25" media for field upgrades of some devices.

hyperhello|10 months ago

Can you make one that emulates a PowerBook 100?

unleaded|10 months ago

can you? There's a MAME driver in macprtb.cpp you could work off—might want a few hacks in your implementation which is nothing new to Mac emulation. also this: https://github.com/evansm7/pico-mac

cosmic_cheese|10 months ago

Came here to say something similar. A laptop with a high quality transflective screen (e-ink is a touch too slow) that can run classic Mac OS with absurdly long battery life would be a nice little device.

ofrzeta|10 months ago

Goodisplay says "Although the refresh rate of monochrome e-paper displays is faster than that of color e-paper, we still recommend allowing at least a 180-second interval after completing a set of display updates. Frequent updates can negatively impact the lifespan of the ePaper."

https://www.good-display.com/news/80.html

So I guess playing Space Quest a lot will rapidly kill that screen.

reaperducer|10 months ago

Reminds me of playing SimCity and learning Turbo C on my IBM PC Convertible with its far inferior non-backlit monochrome display.

Interesting that they Sharpied-out all of the extraneous keys, except Windows.

ryao|10 months ago

It sounds like it would be an awesome portable terminal emulator. Are there any good terminal emulator applications for DOS? How is the Minix 2.0 experience if you go that route?

NoGravitas|10 months ago

Telix was good, as was CKermit for DOS. Neither supports modern perversions like 256 colors, but they both support VT220 or color ANSI.

EvanAnderson|10 months ago

Procomm or Telix would likely run just fine in the DOS side. I don't know if Minicomm will build under Minix but I would certainly investigate it.

TMWNN|10 months ago

MS Kermit

andai|10 months ago

Super cool. I wonder how this would work with one of those transflective LCDs, like the Sharp Memory thing they used in the Playdate.

There's a bit more latency than I'd like with the typing. Though maybe that could be fixed on eink with partial updates?

For me the main benefit of a device like this would be reading and writing without distractions, so having it run DOOM smoothly would not help me! But I do really want low latency typing...

fsmv|10 months ago

This can run my text editor and lisp interpreter I wrote in assembly. I really should get one of these.

api|10 months ago

For a true prepper PC a RISC-V machine running Linux with these kinds of specs would be ideal. Even more cool would be a crank charger along with the solar panels.

Outfit it with a LORA modem capable of running one of those peer to peer LORA mesh text messaging protocols.

badmonster|10 months ago

This is an incredible project! For someone looking to build their own Evertop using this repo, are there any specific hardware schematics, component lists, or 3D print files included or planned to be shared in the future to help with replication?

bee_rider|10 months ago

Interesting hardware.

The IBM emulation stuff—it is a project, the some 40 year old OS seems quite limiting, but I can see why one might do that for fun. But, the hardware looks like… maybe something folks might actually buy? Maybe only us, here, though, haha.

ginkgotree|10 months ago

This actually has some super cool field digital note taking applications, where one may be away from power for a long time and just needs a digital means of writing TXT files. Awesome work!!

pjmlp|10 months ago

While I love the work, it is more like an adaptation, I am quite certain there were no PS/2 keyboards back in XT days, rather the classical din pin one.

PS/2 keyboards are early 1990's.

roywashere|10 months ago

I'm not even sure why you would point this out.

I'm also quite certain there were also no USB flash drives, SD card support, Wifi networking and e-ink displays in the early 1990s. It's not a replica in any way, it does not claim to be that. Just a cool compute device!

shdon|10 months ago

Surely that's Doom8088 rather than the original version if this thing truly emulates an XT level machine (or rather an 80186 CPU)?

Narishma|10 months ago

How does it even work on an 80186? I thought Doom required a 386.

BeefySwain|10 months ago

Anyone know what keyboard that is and where I could get my hands on one?

Just the keyboard. Not the entire unit.

squigz|10 months ago

Fairly unrelated, but loading that repo's page is nearly 200MB... Was a bit surprised at that.

coolcoder613|10 months ago

That's because there is a lot of videos on that page.

hulitu|10 months ago

> Fairly unrelated, but loading that repo's page is nearly 200MB... Was a bit surprised at that.

We have more than 8 GB of RAM, TB of hard drive and GHz computing power. We are humans. We just don't care. If we can waste something, we waste it. /s

bitwize|10 months ago

Just what George R.R. Martin could use if his actual XT ever went kaputski.

Gormo|10 months ago

Wasn't he using a Kaypro running CP/M?

RecycledEle|10 months ago

This is what portable computers should have been.

fnord77|10 months ago

what's the rationale for x86? To run vintage software?

I would love an eink laptop like this but with ARM, modern ports and linux

fsiefken|10 months ago

I think because the PCEmulator on the low power esm32 chip supports DOS and ELKS is just as limited and there is much less software for it.

As an alternative to DOS in the PCemulator that's running you could use FreeDOS or a port of Linux. https://github.com/ESP32DE/Boot-Linux-ESP32S3-Playground https://youtu.be/pj0a91vlcGo

While DOS is limited, you could port your most used tools or software to DOS or port them, there's a vim and emacs port, you can play interactive fiction, read e-books, program in Turbo Pascal 5.5/7.0, Turbo C / Borland C++ (1.x - 3.1), use hypertext, sqlite, markdown, perhaps use long filenames with FreeDOS or Calmira for windows 3.0?

Gormo|10 months ago

> what's the rationale for x86? To run vintage software?

Sounds reasonable. In an off-grid situation, best to stick with software written before the mid-2000s.

6SixTy|10 months ago

Then search for Raspberry Pi laptop cases and go for the one that can hold your choice of eink display + driver?

basemaly|10 months ago

How do I get one of these?

methuselah_in|10 months ago

Damn it looks so good. Great work buddy. kudos.

karunamurti|10 months ago

CTRL+F DOOM. I'm not disappointed.