Item — HN Reader

Bunnie (as you seem to be around here) — can the accel/gyro values be read/sampled? They’re listed under the “anti-tamper” category on crowdsupply so I wasn’t sure. Are there some specs on max Gs, sample rate, etc.?

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I find this device extraordinarily appealing (will definitely be backing). Bunnie is a hardware hacker’s hacker, the project has at least 2 years of development behind it. It will most definitely ship, and work. Ha.

But — I’m specifically excited because this seems like an ideal platform to build whimsical mobile hardware projects.

My dream of a 2000-era electronic organizer with a “retro” (non touch) display, with physical keyboard, and battery, and programmable/hackable and fully open... this is truly a dream come true.

Why couldn’t this become the democratizing mobile Arduino-like hobbyist “base”?

I’m extra, extra excited about it!

(And dream of adding LTE and making a retro minimal... phone OS/“app”? Fast email + wikipedia clients??)

2 comments

Thanks for the enthusiasm! I happen to be up really late tonight, but I'm going to bed soon. Thank you for the support and kind words.

The accelerometer is the LSM6DS3, I'll refer you directly to the manufacturer's website: https://www.st.com/en/mems-and-sensors/lsm6ds3.html

You can find out more about how it's integrated at https://github.com/betrusted-io/betrusted-hardware/blob/mast... (note: this is a "DVT" schematic, bugs were found, they are currently being fixed, but they aren't related to the accelerometer).

The TL;DR is that the accelerometer is integrated so that it's in the "always on" untrusted domain, so to access it from the main FPGA "SoC" you have to go through the system controller FPGA ("EC" as we call it). The idea is for it to be available in power down states for anti-tamper, hence the extra layer of complication.

Talking to it requires a call to the EC via the "COM" bus (https://github.com/betrusted-io/betrusted-soc/blob/master/fw...). The EC driver itself is based on the C-native library provided by STM and translated into Rust bindings. It's a little gross: https://github.com/betrusted-io/betrusted-ec/blob/master/sw/...

Hope that helps.

You don’t know how flustered I am at your response. Thank you so, so much...!

> "Why couldn’t this become the democratizing mobile Arduino-like hobbyist “base”?"

Well, for one thing, the XC7S50 FPGA costs over $50 just for the chip. This device is going to be much more expensive than an Arduino or even a Raspberry Pi.

That’s a very fair point, thank you.

I do hope that the form factor, “polish” — how much of a finished product the Precursor is, and the possibility of programming/extending it can serve as an inspiration/starting point for future hobbyist mobile tech.

I know that it’s a very heterogeneous mix, but just to note some contemporary devices that evoke “similar” feelings: Panic’s Playdate [0] and the recently crowdfunded Flipper Zero [1].

Maybe all of these remind me in some ways of the Gameboy, electronic organizers from the 2000s [2], pre-smartphone Symbian Nokias [3] (and every qwerty/slide out keyboard device from back then), all of which I grew up with.

But, it also seems like there’s a lot of interest now to create digital experiences that aren’t tied to existing social media platforms, aren’t engineered to simultaneously maximize addiction and profit (through advertisement and the sale of personal data).

Developing towards that future is immensely exciting.

0 - https://play.date/

1 - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/flipper-devices/flipper...

2 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_organizer

3 - https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-10-best-symbian-phones-ever