as much as i love physical buttons, not having a bunch of moving parts
is fairly practical. a tablet form-factor with capacitive touch
(possibly with an eink display) would be incredibly useful. it wouldn't
be a computer, but if you are going to be doing serious work it
probably isn't going to be on a tiny pocket computer. right? i guess
part of the question with Nomad is "what is the use case?" a retro
tablet? a work laptop replacement? an ereader replacement?
anything useful that you would use regularly enough to want to hack
on/mod. something "exciting" that can help us convince people that
standards are a good thing. i would be nice if we could come up with
some common interfaces for hardware components. everyone likes doing
their own custom thing and that's great, but if we can work out some
common patterns for describing and modifying hardware components, we
can (hopefully) lay some kind of foundation for a glorious open
hardware future.
i wonder if raspberry pi is a good starting place. there is already a
lot of existing hardware for the B+ and Zero form factors. maybe it
would be a good idea to formalize aspects of the design using some open
formats. if we don't have good programs for this maybe we need to fork
or create something that can be used to store and manipulate our
hardware designs. this isn't an area that i'm very familiar with, but
i'm willing to learn and put time/energy into improving once i have
relax and tomo in a "1.0-ish" state.
that said, this is definitely going to be a team effort. i don't (and
can't) know everything and be involved in every aspect of what we are
trying to accomplish with this holon. there are certain constraints
that i think are important, which i hope we can agree to work within.
minimalism and simplicity are key. i only want my name on useful
technology that is simple and easy to understand. this is a very high
standard that i hope we can hold each other to.
just to recap what i hope our shared goal is here:
the goal with 友 (tomo) is to create a completely decentralized libre
hardware and software platform that is focused on privacy, ease of use,
and hackability. these devices should be as simple as possible.
somebody with basic electronics skills should be able to assemble
anything in our product line without any trouble.
友 is a simple line of DIY-core devices. hardware you can trust because
you assembled it yourself. we put all of the control in your capable
hands. the plans and specs are all available on source. these are
currently a work in progress, but the goal is to make something that
you can assemble in your garage with a 3d printer and some knowledge of
electronics. we picked rpi for the mainboard because of the ecosystem
of cheap, easily sourced parts.
we want to provide a starting point for hackable, modular, mobile
devices. the first iteration is based on stuff that is already on the
market. (very) long term, we would like to look into custom SoC based
on free ip cores so we can ship a fully libre hard/software stack.
to start with, we expect some enthusiasts to pick up our devices for
experimentation and customization. we also want to use tomo as a
vehicle for our #p2p application platform; there is still a lot of
development to do there, but we want to tightly integrate with our
hardware to get everything working flawlessly. the idea is to create a
sort of "freedom garden" of libre apps, services, and hardware.
(copied from a very incomplete roadmap
https://source.heropunch.io/xj9/walkaway-handbook/src/branch/latest/Tomo
)
there's a long way to go between here and there. let's try to make some
useful stuff that can move us in that direction :)
