chrisg.co
chrisg.co
I make a simple arduino touch screen pocket computer. It has text, buttons, wifi, GPS, but it is very limited in capabilities due to super super super tiny CPU and RAM.
I spent months writing a new custom OS that would run on both microcontrollers and desktop computers entirely in C. I built some very advanced standard libraries or frameworks to handle bridging thousands of modern functions and data structures to run on a blank microcontroller or linux kernel desktop. This project spanned months and even ended with me writing my own graphics rendering libraries to skip the GPU and draw UI elements using only a CPU.
This is when I started writing my custom OS to run on ESP32S3 hardware. I purchased many different electronic components, from LCDs of different sizes to many developer boards for chips to make a custom PCB.
By this time, I am blown away by the extreme power of my ESP32S3, a $3 chip. I turned this into a full 2001 laptop computer. It's even better than any Palm OS or Windows Mobile device I have ever used. This thing feels as good as a 2007 iPhone without a GPU. It doesn't have a web browser, but I have made many super pretty user interface apps with thousands of features to come.
I have an ESP32-S3 240MHz dual core 8MB SRAM prototype that runs C code and my custom FreeOS system written in C with Objective CC and CPUGraphics. I tried to make a custom PCB for this, and it booted my system but there were a few issues on the PCB with the display backlight. That was only the 2nd pcb I ever made. Before my pcb came in, I also made a Rockchip RV1106 1.2GHz 256MB SDRAM Linux device prototype. It runs my FreeOS system written in C on top of the linux kernel and allows FreeOS apps to be written in C, Swift, and C#. My FreeOS system also runs as a program on any linux desktop to act as a FreeOS Simulator for FreeOS App Development. Both the ESP32-S3 and RV1106 make a powerful smartphone for under $10. Neither has a GPU (a GPU is a huge percent of the cost of a pocket computer compared to its other components). Both of these pocket computers have CPU Graphics and are powered by my CPUGraphics C Framework. I made my own custom linux mobile desktop environment software. FreeOS is very advanced and the same source files have makefiles to compile for both ESP32 and Linux kernels. I plan to make a custom pcb for the RV1106 board eventually.