I got so much joy from computers and I'd like my kids to have that kind of experience too without accidentally detouring into social media (which has my mind in a vice grip).
Still a couple of years away, but I think I'd like to evaluate this kind of device then and see if it's the right model to use.
Today, kids are surrounded by all kinds of tech. They see people interacting with tech in all kinds of ways from the moment they are cognizant. It's much harder to create that wow moment now.
Also love how absolutely minimal it is in size and if you didnt notice, the screen is a touchscreen. And they have a basic set of ui widgets.
Also interesting, the gfx lets you overlap sprites, bitmap, and text mode. You can tell the designers have lot of XP on 8-bit systems. And the bitmap is a little larger than the screen so you can do some superbitmap stuff. It's bot terribly larger, just a bit.
I havent been using it as much for its synth capabilites, ironically, but for making sequencers for external instruments. I believe it also has audio in...
Also the discord is helpful. 10/10
That it's built off Micropython is a huge deal. I've started using it by default for my hardware projects and it makes everything easier - writing drivers, playing with user interfaces, etc. Loads of regular Python libraries work and I can even grab them over the Internet. Like how I imagine it was running Forth or smth on embedded kits back in the day (ah maybe not the networking bit)
If I were to build a synth a year ago I probably would have used Rust compiled to WASM and running in the browser. This thing has a lot of the same functionality, but you have about -30 million lines of code for the OS, -30MLOC for the browser, and another -30MLOC for Rust/LLVM.
And that doesn't even get in to the cost of materials or power savings.
Obviously it's not apples to apples but it really makes me wonder how much of that stack we need for most programs.
I wonder the same thing a lot. I also wonder how AI will fit into this problem.
The cost of abstraction is always dependencies.
I'm pretty sure I had seen some promotional material of theirs the last time I was in NL, so I didn't know they had gone out of business in 2008/2009 already.
Since the original company both changed names and was subsequently liquidated in bankruptcy nearly 20 years ago... that seems unlikely. There's only so many names out there, and occasionally they get fairly recycled.
It's seems like the Tulip could definitely be used for something like that, though you might have to write quite a bit of your own framework code in python.
Am I wrong to think statements like these are just aspirational warm-and-fuzzies about the product without any real substance?
You could do all those things on anything, but they are typically incongruent with one another. If you are a beginner or a pro, you’re going to be better off doing it on a “more-standard” device.
* Boots almost instantly into a usable system
* I can read and understand every line of code that is running
* I can understand all of the hardware it's running on
We've gotten so used to computers not working. Weird stuff breaks all the time and even experts can only guess why beyond turning it off and on again, which takes minutes for most devices.
I dream of a world where we trust computers to work and be fast. It's completely possible, but step one is reducing complexity by several orders of magnitude.
This seems to be targeting the market of users with the following intersecting interests: * DIY hardware enthusiast * musician * python developer * maybe also wants graphics...? Seems a small segment to me, but I assume I'm missing something here.
The Pocket Operators have something similar (the KO at least, maybe the others). If you've written samples into them you want to preserve for playing live, you can snap a tab off and then they're read-only - no surprises on gig night.
I'm particularly sensitive to shallow critiques of new ways of computing, particularly those that encourage and enable people to be creative. Whether a project is successful or not, it's nice to see something that isn't a "bootup your general purpose comouter and then immediately open a browser" style of computing.
Attempting to get people to interact with the real world and also be creative should be commended.