Oxocards: Interactive programmable minicomputers | Hacker News Reader

Oxocards: Interactive programmable minicomputers

oxocard.ch

103 pointscom126 comments

Their website has not prevented me from finding out what this is! It is hardware. I even found some photos elsewhere: https://www.digitec.ch/en/page/oxocard-learning-to-programme...

That page has prices shown as numbers without any indication of currency; I've never seen that

In the store prices are shown with CHF to the left of the number. CHF means Swiss Francs.

I agree with could have been clearer. Had they used Helvetica, instead of a Helvetica derivative, it would have been more obvious this was a Swiss store.

Lol

I mean, it was obvious that it was Swiss, it's in the title, but international prices are often shown in USD or €.

Anyway, to me it felt like it could be the result of a slight aversion to discussing money, or a slight glorification of numbers, and I hadn't seen that before.

Swiss don't need to know the currency to know they can afford it

Horrible misuse of the term Minicomputer. So triggering!

I'm guessing a language issue, though. Since it's a .ch site maybe their first language isn't English

I was so excited to see a minicomputer on a card. And then... this. So disappointing.

This may be of interest [0][1][2] to the minicomputers should be mini people.

Looks like they ported SIMH to an ESP32 to emulate a PDP-11, to run the original tetris for the Soviet PDP-11 clone (Elektronica60), and 3d printed a mini VT-102 case to put it in.

And also 2.1 BSD..

FTA: "ESP32 was configured to emulate an PDP11-23 with 256K of RAM and a RX01 floppy disk drive, giving me 256KB of disk space for the operating system and game files. I used SIMH on my laptop to create a blank disk and installed RT11 onto it. Next, I took the Russian games disk containing Tetris and copied the binary over. That disk image would get flashed alongside the emulator to the ESP32. I didn't bother with the terminal as of yet, instead opting to just pipe the console of the PDP11 out of the debug serial port of the ESP32."

[0] https://www.hackster.io/news/tiny-3d-printed-dec-vt-102-hide...

[1] https://www.espressif.com/en/news/news/ESP32-Powered_PDP-11

[2]

I was expecting something as large as the PDP-11.

Minicomputers aren't what they used to be.

So this is the Teenage Engineering (specifically, the Pocket Operators) of mini ... errr ... microcomputers? They look really cool. I'm not sure there is much room for extension, but that isn't really the target for these things.

Look, you can’t call a tiny microcomputer a minicomputer. You just can’t!

I noticed the cards have four holes punched into them, one at each corner.

We should call them punch cards!

Looks like the site could do with some proof-reading.

But 40 CHF (approximately the same in dollars or euro) is pretty good for a tiny computer with a screen and a pile of sensors and an easy programming environment.

Maybe I am mis-reading the e-shop, but I see the book as CHF40 and the 12-sensor card as CHF89. Am I wrong?

You're right.

Neat, but I opted for the Beepy: https://beepy.sqfmi.com/

Why do they blur the keyboard in every photo? So strange

I think Blackberry lawyers may have suggested it was too close to actual Blackberry.

Especially in light of the fact that the product was originally called the "beepberry".

Possibly to avoid confusion, with the customizable keyboard?

This reminds me in a way of Java Cards / JCOP. It would be cool to see more people hack around on embedded systems, I'm all for stuff like this lowering the bar for entry. Cool!

They don't seem to have any GPIO, I2C, etc.

Or a battery which is almost a deal-breaker. Probably means hacking a battery controller + battery on the back.

Anybody know about 'Oxoscript'?

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