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Comment by fnord77 | Hacker News Reader

I would love to make one of these with a full-size keyboard, without the touch and without the GUI. Just a term. Think tandy model 100.

> 3D printing, filaments, etc. 340.00

Is this just for the cost of the raw printstock? Or does it include the price of a low-end printer?

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> full-size keyboard, without the touch and without the GUI. Just a term. Think tandy model 100.

Yes! With a nice mechanical keyboard. I found a nice display for something like this a while ago; these 1280x400 pixel, 191 mm wide (visible area) IPS displays originally meant for automotive use:

https://www.buydisplay.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?re...

I don't think getting a reflective LCD display in this form factor is realistic these days, they stopped manufacturing those in the 80s. I bought this OLED 256x64 display to play with- it's got enough pixels to make it work, but it's just too small/high density to work well form-factor-wise with a full width tenkeyless keyboard.

Filament is really cheap. Basic pla is roughly 2-3c a gram. I couldn't see this being more than 500 grams, so maybe $10-20 for filament, maybe $30 if you use abs or something.

I'm guessing the rest of the price is paying to have it printed by a third party.

I've been looking into something like this, and it seems the display is the hardest part. I haven't been able to find a large monochrome LCD that is compatible. Now if you don't care if the screen uses a lot of power, is color, etc. then there are a lot of options similar to what you're describing on reddit.com/r/cyberDeck

You can do it for ~$30-40. There are two problems: The screen, and the microcontroller. For the screen, you can just use a regular TFT, and only display one color. This has the benefit of bringing down the size of the frame buffer down from 800x480x8 or 16 to 800x480x1. That's still a lot of RAM for a microcontroller, but you can get displays with onboard graphics RAM, and any small microcontroller can use the on-board GRAM as a framebuffer. Line scrolling is a bit of a trip (kind of like a bubble sort, but on lines of pixels), and blinking the cursor is _weird_, but yeah, it can be done on a $1 microcontroller and a $5 screen.

Anyway, here's what I'm working on: https://twitter.com/MrRobotBadge/status/1274490808616419328

It's based on the VT-100. It's got a 69 key keyboard. The name VT-420 was already taken, so it's called the VT-69.

Blinking used to be accomplished by XORing the pixels with '1'. The nice thing is it doesn't use any memory to restore it since you just XOR a second time to get what you had back.

Nice!

Would something like https://www.adafruit.com/product/4694 be any good to you?

Yes, it's almost perfect, it's just a little small (I'd prefer at least 6"x2" like the Alphasmart) and sold out.

The cost is very high for just the materials, even rounded up to the nearest reel. On the other hand, you'd be lucky to buy an ABS-capable printer for under $340, considering they generally require a thermal shroud to print reliably.

I added an rpi0 to my Olivetti M10 (a Model 100 clone) and it is wonderful! So much data, a great keyboard, and a reason to sit and read and stop bothering about pixels .. ;)

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