> In the realm of connectivity, there's been a fair amount of playing > around with bluetooth serial on M100s. Incorporating a BT serial radio > might be nice.
To be fair, I work for a company that makes WiFi/BT chips with a pretty kick-arse CPU in them (the tiny Mac as well as the tiny GameBoy are made with that chip - on that note, if you allow me the small plug, you can actually get the tiny game console yourself: https://www.crowdsupply.com/teampocket/pocketsprite ) and I have been thinking on putting that in, giving the T100 the capability to just dial into Telnet-based BBSses from whereever. The main reason I did not do this is power draw: the ESP32 (the chip in question) can easily eat up 50mA or so when working. (On second thought - that idea may need revisiting in the short to medium future. I seem to recall that the SDK team got light sleep to work, allowing the thing to go to sleep when it has finished emulating the cycles for a period. That could bring down the power usage. Hmm. Would mean no USB anymore, however, as the ESP32 lacks that particular interface.) In general, one of my first design ideas was to allow the entire thing to run on a coin cell - that lead to my choice of a member of the very efficient STM32L422 chip. (Which, as Ken mentioned, has a limited amount of flash and RAM.) Maybe I should just assume a halfway decent LiIon battery instead and skimp a bit less on the power. (Would also allow me to use an OLED screen like https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.16.3a8827c8g0S1uW&id=540058249955&ns=1&abbucket=4#detail - I don't really want to skimp on size, but these OLEDs have an excellent contrast which may help people with bad eyesight. Would look less like a 'real' Model T then, however... > For the serial port UART, it might be nice to increase the RX buffer > size to allow the slow CPU more time to catch up. For an emulated > machine that might not be important, but might consider it. Sure! I'm doing serial over USB anyway, right now, so I can make the buffers as large or small as I need. Lastly, implementing on-board storage in the form of an internal emulated TPDD would be awesome, esp if the USB could present the emulated disk as a mass storage gadget. That's actually pretty easy to implement. Cheers, Jeroen On 02/07/2018 12:24 AM, Josh Malone wrote: > For me, I can think of a very few things that need "improving" or > "fixing" on the M100: > > > For the serial port UART, it might be nice to increase the RX buffer > size to allow the slow CPU more time to catch up. For an emulated > machine that might not be important, but might consider it. > > Lastly, implementing on-board storage in the form of an internal > emulated TPDD would be awesome, esp if the USB could present the > emulated disk as a mass storage gadget. > > -Josh >
