You're absolutely right! I wasn't there either, and i wouldnt want a terminal-only machine.

My goal is providing means and knowledge to those that want it. The Ashet is more meant for technical schools, apprenticeship and "the interested", and definitly requires an initial spark that will make that project interesting to you.

It's here to fill a (percieved) gap and wants to sit more in the professional education part than the "get the kids to computing".

I'd love to have had such a hands-on device in school instead of the bare theory of circuit operation and basics of programming.

However I will question some design choices!

- 32-bit only: the writing is on the wall, many vendors (HW&SW) are slowly moving to kill it off. I guess it's fine, but IMHO each ISA (regardless of pointer width) should just be considered a different ISA. Portability is good, it ensures your software doesn't hardcode too many assumptions about the platform - and weeds out bugs. Just treat an int like an int, and a pointer like a pointer. Distinct types.

- Pure co-op multitasking: it will be completely fine, until you try serious in-system development. Hard reboot any time I make a mistake in a for-loop? Mercy, please :,) Implementing a simple watchdog via a timer interrupt will still keep all of the scheduling logic simple and stupid: it's just another case for a yield call, except now involuntary. The runaway process will simply never see completion, but seeing that it would never yield anyway, I don't see a problem just killing it. And most importantly, the sanity shall be preserved.

I just don't think modern CPUs really quite fit the claim of "fully understandable by a single person". I mean maybe technically but that is misleading in an educational context where there are much simpler computers that are definitely fully understandable.

Maybe all of the stuff he wraps around the main CPU is understandable though. And the expansion cards are cool.

I'm also having ADHD but you can get help with the focus problem ;)

It's incredible to work for many years on the same thing and it's so pleasing to have steady progress.

So: Go, start building a vision for your cyberdeck! Having a clear goal helps you working towards building it, and you cam embrace the ADHD by jumping around between the many aspects of such a project.

sw design, hw design, visual design, mechanical design, handcrafting, soldering, programming, making websites, asking people, ...

It now took me 3 iterations and 3 years to get a somehow working risc-v CPU written in VHDL, that I am mostly satisfied with. It's a crazy hard struggle (finally pipelined though!). Everything breaks, I constantly get headaches and almost want to quit, but somehow I can keep on pushing this project. It helps me a lot.

Almost nothing works, things break all the time, it doesn't even look cool. But somehow it's satisfying that I can type words with a PS/2 keyboard on a VGA screen getting processed by my own RISC-V CPU (running Rust btw lol. I ditched that by now though, the struggle was too big). See here: https://i.imgur.com/PtKeAYt.mp4

I have no idea how far I can make it, maybe not fully self-hosted, but a small OS should be doable. I have interrupts and timers working, so I should have everything I need.

The downside is, I am way worse than OP and have no documentation at all. I should do that, but that's where the motivation is missing.

Edit: I type so slow in the video because I did poll the scancodes (too slow) and had to think which characters not to press, because i dont accept all yet and was scared that it breaks

There are many tricks to stay focused, particularly when there are no stakeholders but you. Try a body double, someone to keep you in check - you can also return the favor, like working from the same room, or just coming to their home to watch them clean while you do your stuff.

When you do get hyperfixated on something - that can be a very productive period, until you crash. Again, bring in a friend. Not to get back to it - just to make sure you're still eating. Don't push yourself to either side, find your own balance around it - I've picked up many hobbies where I've slowed down, but maintained interest over the years, decades.

Look for buddies in your local neurodivergent group, there's usually one somewhere near you. (Even here on HN, it turns out.)

https://youtu.be/_4nthOx8sA4?si=AiK9bRxRQwV3MB0f

There's also this Atari homebrew

https://youtu.be/T14dL9MeMHE?si=cGtsZGWILYi4jcql

And yes the IIGS had one

https://youtu.be/YvVFTpukAp0?si=UtvV3N_pKhxU-Tyb

Locally, 4$ is probably "more money" to us than 5$ is to you.

Don't get me wrong, it's still a marvel that we can have something so good so cheaply -- but correcting for cost of living, it feels less affordable for us here in Asia.

Anyway, not a criticism. Just sharing a slice of life from over here in case you were curious.

Also, besides some really huge companies, I would be nervous as a business to rely on a third party so much that I didn't have a workforce of my own.

Yes, it works for automotive (extremely consolidated sector with huge capital), or Amazon, or chipmakers... But they've already gone through that transition. Who else needs that?

The real bottleneck is getting custom pcbs made.

The best companies that do this are in China and soon will be tarrifed

Please take a look at the gallery, where there are photos of the actual electronics setups!

Also don't the mechanical mockups count as hardware? A pile of jumperwires, breadboards and devices don't make a good hero image, but physical hardware mockups do.

Also the electronics design in its current form is actually iteration 5 of the system, while the OS development started with iteration 2.

The OS does boot on the electrical prototype

Yes, the OS is highly opinionated, as just making another linux is incredibly boring for me!

The 32-bit only constraint is mainly due to my focus on smaller architectures, especially microcontrollers.

x86_64 and aarch64 both have much more complex initialiastion schemes, and also use much more complex page table setups.

Thus, i wanted to keep that out of the system, considering i'm targeting systems with a tiny fraction of the 4 GiB memory limit.

The co-op multitasking is a part of the OS, and the OS doesn't give you preemptive multitasking. I never said i won't implement sanity safeguards! Just killing off a hanging process that doesnt yield for more than 1-5 secs is totally i scope and increases user friendlyness. but considering the system reboots in 1.2 s on target hw right now, the user will maybe just have hit reset by then :D

The most interesting part to me right now is running Zig on a microcontroller, since that's something I really wanted to do this year (like a new year's resolution thing). I've been interested in Zig for a while, but I've never done any serious learning/programming with it, so I might look at your OS repo to at least gain some inspiration on how deploying to a microcontroller works.

It also seems like it would be a really good way to learn embedded electronics in general, since if I wanted to learn something new, eg lower level network programming, I could make and program a network card, or usb hosting, or anything like that.

I'll definitely try to do it one day, once I've finished all my current projects haha

Are there any other projects or resources in this space that you'd recommend?

A friend and I cut our teeth on those AlphaSmart word processors that ran BASIC. I might could wrap my head around that.

Wanna hop onto my crazy train and make a second main board?

I wanna make the Ashet Home Computer an open and free platform, so if you implement the backend control interface, you can use all of the environment yourself.

> I am way worse than OP and have no documentation at all.

I confess guilty at the currenr point. I do have planned a large phase in development where i will create entry-level docs for everything, as these are an essential part of the project.

The video is incredibly cool! Ashet started as a SoC in a ECP5, but the RP2350 basically hit all my spec requirements better than i could've done it myself, which made it a no-brainer to ditch the FPGA