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Hardware

Solar RISCOS Computer 82

Posted by michael from the sunshine-my-only-sunshine dept.
A reader sent in a link to an ultra-low-power RISCOS computer designed to be powered by a single small solar panel. They're aiming for a complete system which draws only 8.5 watts, which would be incredible if they can manage it.
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Solar RISCOS Computer More

Solar RISCOS Computer

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  • Been Done (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I already have one of those. I wear it on my wrist and it says "Timex" on it. Advanced features include, but are not limited to: Keeping Time, Displaying Time in a Digital Format, Calculator, bash shell, perl, etc.
  • Usually ARMs aren't used for higher scaled things because it lacks floating point. (Note: yes, I know ARM *just* announced floating point support in their newest cores, but even ARM7 is just an integer processor).

    So, good luck even trying to do stuff like image analysis, physical simulation, etc. in an emulated FP environment.
  • the light of day. It's too good an idea. At least as a consumer item. I'm sure theres something like this already out there for those highway info signs, and consumers won't pay what a state DOT would pay per unit. I'll give you $50 bucks though.
    --

  • Re:Did I miss something? (Score:3)

    by danny ( 2658 ) on Sunday July 15, 2001 @12:30AM (#84504) Homepage
    Very few people in "the Third World" are actually starving, you know! But see my attempt at an FAQ on this [danny.oz.au].

    Danny.

  • fast, power efficient, x86 compat: choose 2. x86 doesn't pipeline easily. It's complicated to implement in a way that runs fast, as evidenced by everyone who's tried, such as Intel, AMD, or Transmeta. If you wanted power-efficient x86, you'd have to give up on pipelining and stuff, i.e. your chip would be slow, like a 386.
    #define X(x,y) x##y
  • Nice idea, but Intel already has conditional move, and maybe some other conditional insns. For web serving and compiling, and other integer tasks, a bunch of ARM processors might well do a good job. I wouldn't guess that it would be particularly easy to implement a very fast ARM machine, since the insn set is not simpler than the Alpha's for example, I don't think.

    Anyway, it might be worth doing this, but probably not, unless it can be done cheaply.
    #define X(x,y) x##y
  • According to a blurb on the site these machines are being used largely to assist in filling innocent people's minds with western religious garbage.

    The following is a PAID ADVERTISEMENT from our sponsors.

    Hi There! I'm Troy McLure, and I'm here to tell these starving, oppressed Africans about the deal of of Lifetime! Sure you people are hungry now, but in exchange for your personal integrity and common sense we're willing to help you convince yourself that your suffering here is a wonderful and fullfilling way to accrue spiritual bonuses that will pay off BIGTIME when you reach those pearly gates! Order now, and soon you'll be saying "Oh boy! Thank you Jesus, I can't wait to die!"

    /ADVERTISEMENT

  • oops, sorry about the blank post before. Anyhow, this whole HolyBible application just bugs me. I think the last thing these people need is a solar powered pulpit to espouse more "Birth Control Is Wrong" Bullshit in places where it is so well needed.
  • Gets dark? Hand crank. Car batteries.

  • Re:Makes sense (Score:3)

    by whydna ( 9312 ) <.whydna. .at. .hotmail.com.> on Saturday July 14, 2001 @08:02PM (#84510)
    dude... the Crusoe is a form of RISC chip. The guy who developed the concept of VLIW (very long instruction word), the same guy who suggested that RISC offers better performance over CISC, is one of the founders of Transmeta.

    Crusoe is like a "super tiny number of operations" chip. It supports more advanced operations in a software layer around the chip (and that's why it can emulate an x86 chip). Of course it also optimizes as it goes.. but that's outside the scope of what we're discussing...

    So, no.. crusoe is not a "power-hog compared to many RISC processors".. it should fall in the lower end of the spectrum of similiarly performing RISC chips...

    -Andy
  • What is the point of taking these things into 3rd world countries? You'd think folsk would try and feed the people before they gave them e-mail... Although, these units might be fun to play with. Solar powered mp3 juke-box anyone?
  • I've been to "3rd world" countires, I spent several years in the Army. Our unit spent lots of time in South America build schools and such.

    I also see the hundreds of homeless everyday where I work. Sure we need to feed our own people. It's always pissed me off how we run to some country in Africa to feed some kids before we look in our own backyards.

    I also see tons of homeless people hanging out in the Public Libraries all day long surfing and checking their e-mail here. Maybe I've become a bit jaded...

    Oh, and I'm rather well fedd. So, you can get your own computer. :)
  • You can get both a million volts and a million amps out of a single AA battery, just not for very long. To get it a million volts and amps for the longest amount of time you would probably have to use a lithium ion battery. Additionally, you would also need an inductor and a capacitor. Just don't be near me when you try this. For starters you would have to defeat some basic safety mechanisms on the battery. Drawing that much current that fast would make the battery explode. Molten lithium and molten lithium hydroxide are not fun. You'd also get some terrible arcing unless you used the right components. All and all this would not be a good idea.

  • Have you ever been in a third-world country? My friends have, some are in the Peace Corps. Yes, they have starving people, but so do we. Why don't we feed our homeless before we spend a penny on things like NASA?


    Well, money spent on NASA is a lot more practical than money spent on the army..
    With that money you can feed the whole world population.
  • You know that there is a company selling solarpanels for Apple Powerbooks?
    And that folded those fit nicely in every computer bag?
    I had one for my Pb 145b.

  • Re:8.5W? (Score:3)

    by MsWillow ( 17812 ) on Saturday July 14, 2001 @09:16PM (#84516) Homepage Journal
    Many moons ago, for fun (and field day that year :) ), I took the guts of a "laptop" power supply, bought surplus, and fitted it to a '386SX-20 system, with 5M ram, and a 40MB hd. We bolted this to an SVGA monochrome monitor that ran off of 12 volts. All of this was powered by a large 12 volt deep-cycle battery, which was, in turn, recharged by a few 15v 2A solar panels.

    This, in turn, was attached to a TNC, and a 2m HT. both of which also ran from 12 volts. It made a rather nice emergency system :) Especially when plugged into the 2m side of the satellite antenna array (which, by an amazing co-incidence (actually, it took research to find the right parts), had rotors, both azimuth and elevation, powered by 12 volts DC).

    Now, granted the whole station consumed far more than 8.5 watts, but this was all off-the-shelf hardware from 1994, so I'd certainly hope that *some* progress has been made since then.
  • <...RISC OS had some neat stuff, such as the whole Application directory thing, which Apple now pretty much use in the form of Bundles. Unfortunately, it fell way behind after RISC OS 3.1. The RISC PC was OK, but RISC OS 3.5 had too few enhancements, and when Phoebe was cancelled at the last minute, RISC OS 4 didn't see the light of day until it was too late....>

    Mate, Apple's bundles come from NEXTSTEP, and I doubt NeXT were influenced by acorn at the time

  • slow? (Score:1)

    by sporty ( 27564 )
    now that would be one slow spinning hd. kidding .. i know they' d use flash memory for it :P

    ---
  • agreed.
    There's a lot of good mission work being done. Work done by clueful folks who really want to help, and that helps improve the quality of life for people.
    There's also a bunch of repressed yoyo's out there in THE NAME OF GOD, messing with people's culture and trying to force them into repressed western beliefs, with no infrastructure to support it.
    </pointless commentary>

  • The only real advantage of the Crusoe for low-power devices is x86 compatibility. If you're not intending to run (non-CE) Windows, it doesn't make much sense. Strong ARM goes almost as fast with considerably less power consumption.

    If these boxes weren't so heavy and pricey, they'd make nice linux boxes.

  • Re:8.5W? (Score:1)

    by brg ( 37117 )
    These guys [cellcomputing.com] have a Pentium III-500MHz system which is supposed to run at 5W typically. We [nersc.gov] have one and have been running some of our code on it (it's actually owned by another group and we're borrowing time on it for a while.)

    Their claims would be impressive if they made it work at 8.5W max, rather than 8.5W typical.

  • What kind of orbit is that exactly that it stays on the sunny side? Not geosynchronous since that follows the same global spot around.

    Same orbit as the moon.

    Guess again...the moon is dark for roughly two weeks at a time. There's one side that always faces us as a result of the moon making one orbit and one revolution in about the same amount of time, but it still passes behind us and is therefore cut off from the sun. That's what accounts for the phases of the moon and the occasional lunar eclipse.

    Anything that orbits the earth will, by definition, be blocked from the sun at some point. If it's a really big orbit, the time in which it's blocked will be a small percentage, but you won't get access to the sun 100% of the time. If you put it into a solar orbit with an orbital period of one year, it might be doable...but would the sun exhibit enough of a pull on something as lightweight as a satellite to keep it on course? IANAOME ("OME"="orbital mechanics expert"), so I could be completely off-base on this...

  • New name (Score:3)

    by halfline ( 48947 ) on Saturday July 14, 2001 @08:01PM (#84523) Homepage
    They should change the name to Solaris. Errr. Oh wait....
  • SO, I guess that the phrase "Evil day-star!" doesn't really apply anymore, eh?

  • Looks like someone hasn't done math on this!

    You better not use all your charge, or on an overcast day, you'll be SOL! It takes 16 hours to charge!

    More likely they are assuming that it doesn't need to be on all day, or at least pulling full power all the time. Also, the last 30 or so digits in your result are meaningless due to the limited precision of the data, but I'm sure you knew that ;).
  • Kinda like those windup flashlights and radios that you can by now in malls. Originally designed for 3rd world countries, but turns out there was a market everywhere else--for emergency use. Although I'm hard pressed to see a similiar need for these things.
  • What is the point of taking these things into 3rd world countries? You'd think folsk would try and feed the people before they gave them e-mail...

    It's not like the *entire* third world is sitting around waiting to be fed so they can more on to, say, shoes or something. Think of millions of individuals, each with their own problems, abilities and situations--a wide spectrum, instead of generalizing a single television delivered image of a starving ethiopian to the entire population of africa.

    Everything helps.
  • A lot of food spoils before it gets to the right place. The internet is good for managing logistics. Farmer's markets are interesting places, but they are not the most efficient way to sell a crop.

    Information can help farmers improve crop yield and reduce his expenses. Also better manage pesticides and irrigation usage.

  • <a href="http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=ww w.riscos.org">netscraft report on riscos.org</a>.

  • Here's some real solar power (Score:3)

    by gad_zuki! ( 70830 ) on Saturday July 14, 2001 @07:29PM (#84530)
    www.solarhost.com [solarhost.com]already powers more than a few websites using just the free radiation from that big thing in the sky.
  • from what i could tell by looking at the site, they are not just marketed towards the natives, they seem to be amrketed towards missionaries.
  • Price seems fair enough. Same price range as any other RISCOS machine. You want a quality UI you pay for it.

  • The amount of times I've had apps go haywire and had to reset due to the OS using CMT is rather silly.

    You must have been running a dodgy 3rd party patch. I used RiscOS for years and it was rock solid. I used to leave my computer permanently on and can't remember ever having to do a reset. With a StrongARM the computer boots in under a second anyway.

    How can an OS with CMT, no memory protection and uses kernel modules for libraries be considered reliable at anything other than mundane stuff?

    True... and about 99% of computer use is for mundane stuff. I've used RiscOS as a web server without any problems, but I certainly wouldn't use it in production! But then why would I? Linux does the job great. However RiscOS blows Linux, Mac and Windows out of the water as a desktop machine. This is good for me because it gives me a competative edge over those having to use other OS.

    RiscOS is also a joy to program. You can knock up a MT windowed application in an hour in BASIC, and when it runs (interpreted) it's lightening fast. Incredible. Programming assembler for the ARM is so easy too. The way it's so modular, you can change any aspect of the OS you like despite the fact it's not Open Source. The elegance of the architecture, it's ease of use... oh don't get me started or I'll go on for hours. RiscOS seriously rocks.

    Phillip.

  • There are a number of reasons why RiscOS is suitable for this application:

    • ease of use - the gui is much easier to learn than eg Windows
    • ROM based - not only does it take less power by not having to access the HD all the time but it cannot get corrupted (not many techies in 3rd world countries to fix screwed up OS)
    • fast - the OS has been hand-optimised in assembler making it responsive even on low-power processors


    Though they give running of a solar cell as an example, it can be a hybrid of many types of renewable energy. Wind, biomass (extracting oil from plants to power generator), etc. You can read more about what's going on in the world at Future Energies [futureenergies.com].

    Phillip.

  • "What kind of orbit is that exactly that it stays on the sunny side? Not geosynchronous since that follows the same global spot around." Same orbit as the moon.

  • A new ruggedised RISCOS computer, the Solo is intended for use within Third-world countries where its ultra-low-power design enables it to be used indefinitely away from sources of mains electricity.

    We would need state of the art high tech computers so they can work in low tech third world countrys.

    -Jon
  • You sir, are a moron. Your 600mhz laptop survives on 52watts/hour

    You, sir, cannot read. The battery on which the laptop survives happily for 4 hours is a 52 Watt-HOUR battery. 52Wh/4h=13W.

    As for the bottom of my laptop... no, actually it isn't hot. Slightly warm, but that's about it.
  • What's the big deal about 8.5W? My 600MHz PIII laptop survives quite easily on 13W (at least, it lasts over 4 hours on a "52 Watt-Hour" battery), and I'm sure that could easily be reduced further. Slowing down the hard drive, slowing down the processor (& running at lower voltage), and dimming that annoyingly bright LCD backlight come to mind as simple ways of reducing the power consumption.
  • Completely forgeting the flame wars that have resulted from calling it RiscOS, it is RISC OS, the company that produces the desktop version is RISCOS Ltd, the only thing with lower case was the RiscPC one of the last RISC OS machines made by Acorn Computers
  • what runs in a solar-powered calculator? Is there even a microprocessor?

    I'd guess it has a very simple microcontroller.

    Also, the Palm only draws 3 volts

    And the static electricity that gathers as you shuffle your feet on the carpet can be many thousands of volts. My point being that it's not the voltage, nor even the current, that matters. What matters is the product of the two: power (watts). You could get a million volts out of a single AA battery. Or you could get a million amps. (Theoretically. ;) But you can't get both.

  • "Even this is minute compared with a typical full Pentium PC system (incl monitor) at around 500 W."

    Man, I don't know what kind of dinosaurs they are using, but my system draws @ least a kw.

    When I turn it on, My neighbors loose thier tv signal, and the whole block complains that the lights are dimming, and if the microwave is running I blow the steal bar I use for a fuse right out of it's socket.

    DW
  • "RiscOS is IMHO one of the most optimized operating systems ever"

    The only reason for that is a huge amount of it is hand optimised assembler, which is causing RISC OS Ltd. serious problems. After all, has there been any sign of even RISC OS 4.5 yet?

    "RiscOS has only been ported to specific architectures such as Acorn Computers"

    Acorn wrote RISC OS, they haven't ported it anywhere, unless you want to count the RISC PC as a different platform.

    RISC OS was good in its time, but Acorm let it fall behind. It has no memory protection, still uses co-operative multi-tasking and it impliments shared libraries in the form of what can be described as kernel modules.
  • "You must have been running a dodgy 3rd party patch"

    Back in those days, I used a lot of PD apps to make up for the short-comings of the OS. Memphis was a dear friend to me (Interesting hack too, using the system sprites area (Is that the right name? Been a while) to create a resizable RAM disk.

    Anyway, if any of those apps decided they were going to hang, I'd be in trouble.

    "I used RiscOS for years and it was rock solid"

    I used it 1989-1997 all the way from an A3000 to a RISC PC. When I was *really* into it (1993/4 or so), I couldn't keep running more than a day without having to reset due to either a hang or excessive memory leakes. Sometimes Impression Style would just up and die leaving anything up to 2MB unaccounted for. On a 4MB machine that left me with about 500K to use.

    "With a StrongARM the computer boots in under a second anyway"

    ?! Under RO 3.7 that simply wasn't true. My father has a StrongARM RISC PC and it takes at least a second to get to the "RISC OS 50MB" prompt before booting the GUI. It would then wait for the hard disk to spin up and then spend around another 5-10 seconds loading the GUI and startup apps. Yes, it's fast, but my box *never* gets reset unless I'm installing a new kernel or I'm booting into Windows to play a game.

    "True... and about 99% of computer use is for mundane stuff"

    True, I'll give you that, but RISC OS can't even do that well any more. Take web browsing. On every other platform, the browser and dial-up-networking tools are free or come with the OS. Oh, and is there a web browser that supports HTML4 and even a small subset of CSS?

    "Linux does the job great. However RiscOS blows Linux, Mac and Windows out of the water as a desktop machine"

    Err...no. It certainly has advantages, but the apps let it down. Like I pointed out, decent browsers simply do not exist. I refuse to support Netscape 4 because of its sub-standard CSS support, don't even think of asking me to go all the way back to HTML 3.2.

    "RiscOS is also a joy to program"

    You've obviously never used a decent IDE. Granted, there were decent UI designers for RISC OS back when I was learning to program, but times change.

    "You can knock up a MT windowed application in an hour in BASIC"

    But what does it do? I can easily knock up a MT windowed application in Qt using Kdevelop in that time depending on what it has to do.

    "Programming assembler for the ARM is so easy too"

    You still make heavy use of assembler? Oh dear. OK, assembler is OK for small programs but it eventually holds you back if you want to do anything serious.

    "The way it's so modular, you can change any aspect of the OS you like despite the fact it's not Open Source"

    That's nothing new, it's called libraries. In Linux, for example, there was a project called harmony to write a free version of Qt which wasn't open source at the time. Hell, Lesstif is a pretty good recreation of Motif, which wasn't open source until recently. In Windows, there's an ActiveX control that lets you replace IE's html parser with Mozilla's. This sort of thing is not exclusive to RISC OS.

    "RiscOS seriously rocks"

    You speak about RISC OS as if I've never used it. I wrote my first programs in RISC OS, it was my primary platform until I got my first PC in 1997. Granted, I hated some aspects of Windows, but I moved to Linux in early 1999 and never looked back.
  • "Cooperative multitasking is not a real problem if you are not considering RiscOS stations as servers."

    The amount of times I've had apps go haywire and had to reset due to the OS using CMT is rather silly.

    " IMHO, if the Wimp (RiscOS GUI - a FLA for Windows-Icons-Menus-Pointer) is so responsive (and I doubt there is anywhere a so full-featured responsive GUI) it is because Acorn aimed it at the end user which is not a bad concept."

    Yes and no. Initially, it had to be fast on an 8MHz ARM2 with a dumb frame-buffer. When the ARM3 came out, Acorn did NewLook which was still fast. However, that speed came from using hand-optimised assembler, which has turned into a nightmare as far as maintaining it goes.

    RISC OS was never meant to be a long term OS, it just evolved from Arthur, which was an OS they quickly threw together so they could show off their new A310.

    " If you consider what RiscOS platform excell at, then you won't need real-time multitasking. Of course, now their technology may now seem obsolete but I still make an heavy use of my RiscPC as no other environment can provide me with such optimal and ergonomic tools, especially when it comes to DTP."

    Ah yes, I used to love Impression Publisher. Those were the days :). However, I did things other than DTP and Acorn fell behind.

    "The "death" of Acorn was not its community's and there are still lots of unique concepts which come from them."

    The Acorn community is virtually on its death bed, and deluding itself isn't helping. After all, RISC OS Ltd. have all but decided not to bother with RISC OS 5 until they have to, and the article at riscos.org about reliability is a bunch of fluff. How can an OS with CMT, no memory protection and uses kernel modules for libraries be considered reliable at anything other than mundane stuff?

    "Look at ROX, for instance..."

    I actually submitted some icons for ROX back in the early days of 0.0.5 or so.

    " Anyway, I'd also like to say that some "multithreading-like" is still possible under RiscOS as the fact switching betwen apps is not that optimal doesn't mean we are monotasking."

    It's not monotasking, but CMT is far from optimal. I remember talk about Wimp2 when somebody implimented PMT, but it had a lot of trouble with the rest of the OS and applications being designed for CMT.

    RISC OS had some neat stuff, such as the whole Application directory thing, which Apple now pretty much use in the form of Bundles. Unfortunately, it fell way behind after RISC OS 3.1. The RISC PC was OK, but RISC OS 3.5 had too few enhancements, and when Phoebe was cancelled at the last minute, RISC OS 4 didn't see the light of day until it was too late.
  • One of the greatest contributions to humanity
    by mission workers in the field today is the
    work of rendering smaller regional languages
    into a written form, and providing literacy
    training to the population of native speakers.
    The mission workers of my acquaintance would
    have, to a man/woman, benefitted tremendously
    from the availablity of such a conveniently
    field-operable computer which can serve as
    an aid both in language acquisition (a reverse
    engineering task for which Wycliffe in particular
    has created a very interesting body of software)
    and literacy training.
  • but the netwinder 2100 (SA110) that sells
    for $995 doesn't include a keyboard,
    touchpad, flat-panel display, and solar panel!
    Looks like they must be making about $500/unit
    in profit, what ho? Them solar arrays ain't
    cheap.
  • Access to online information can mean a lot to people in developing countries. Farmers can download commodity price data, and use it to bargain with (or bypass) brokers. Fishermen can access weather data, which not only helps them fish, but may well save their lives.

    But here's what should be the clincher: for real democracy to work, citizens need to be able to monitor the activities of their ruling elite. That's the best way to ensure that all that aid money actually does some good, and doesn't get frittered away on boondogles and corruption.

    If we really want to help all the starving masses, we have to lose the patronizing attitude. People in the third world won't move forward until they are allowed to play a role in their own future. Freedom of information is a big part of that.

    __

  • It is probably designed with space in mind. Put those babies on a satellite which orbit Earth on the sunny side and you're all set.

    Finally a contrast to all those powerhungry CPU's from AMD and Intel !

  • I'm not that familiar with the Alpha's instruction set, but I'm quite sure that the decored for the ARM instruction set is much simpler than the x86 decoder in the P4. If they can run that monster at 1.7GHz with dual ALUs and an FPU then it would seem to me that there must be room for improvement in the ARM?

  • multi-scalar ARM processors? (Score:4)

    by spongman ( 182339 ) on Saturday July 14, 2001 @10:04PM (#84551)
    Is it just me or would ARM processors be a great platform for high-power computing? Surely their low power consumption, which is one of the main things slowing down the mega-processors of today (read: x86-base monsters) gives them much greater headroom than their large cousins.

    I'm no processor expert. But it would seem to me that if intel can build a 20-stage pipeline for the P4, they're going to have to waste quite a bit of that on misses of the branch-prediction process. The conditional execution of the ARM instruction set would provide an excellent means of reducing the need for much of this branch prediction. Its low power consumption and small size should be an excellent base for addition of further optimizations, such as a deeper pipeline, super-scalar ALUs, larger instruction caches and faster clock speeds. I'm sure if you were to flesh one of these out to the extent that the P4/Palomino have been, it would make quite a processor.

    Imagine a beowulf, err...

  • What kind of orbit is that exactly that it stays on the sunny side? Not geosynchronous since that follows the same global spot around.

  • Because of power demands, I would imagine that they would try to consolidate as many 24x7 services onto as few systems as possible so that you would not have so many cases where you would need to pull power constantly. This is obviously not meant to be used for anything more than the most desperate of moments in one's computing addiction: if you do a demonstration for a village, it has to be short and you shut it off quickly after to recharge over the rest of the day in order to keep from using those 8.5W to maximize charge time. Hopefully they'll be responsible folks and set up some proper power management on these systems. In fact, we might see the next waves of ultra-low power systems coming from Africa and developing countries, so look there for experts in saving a couple of amps and making hardware work under tight conditions. Not too far from what satellite engineers do when they design systems for use in space.

    Something needing to be on all the time would probably just need a few more panels ganged together in order to charge more batteries to last through the night. If this is small enough, you could also permanently mount it in the back of a small pickup with a cap on it to use as a roving communications lab. I wonder what the cheapest, lowest power communications technology available for this is that will allow it to roam and still transfer emails in a developing country, even if it is only 2400 baud. Also remember that the target audience of developing countries does not have the same perspective of a small increase in price that we do, so increasing the size of the solar panel and the battery might just take it out of the hands of a lot of people.

  • You've made the assumption that all of the third world is represented by Sally Struthers' late night commercials. There are parts of the third world that are ready to advance along with the rest of us and they resent being depicted as all looking up in hope of the next US food airdrop. Sure they need to feed their people, but at the same time you can't stifle their ambition to advance their technological capability, because in turn that goes back to helping those starving people in some way. Whether it is better agricultural science, or analysis of conditions in villages, or a census, they serve a purpose. Even the email gives them a voice outside of their nation so that they can possibly learn about how they might improve a small bit of their condition.

    Now that is making some real use out of a computer, not vegetating while playing MP3s and surfing the web.

  • Rock on. But what about when darkness falls?
  • Solar computers, China made one long ago; It's name: Abacus.

  • RiscOS, of course... (Score:3)

    by mirko ( 198274 ) on Sunday July 15, 2001 @12:13AM (#84557) Journal
    I have been using RiscOS computers for 6 years (and I am not a veteran) and I currently feel quite happy to see that other people tend to agree on its qualities in terms of power consumption, but also modularity, ergonomy...
    >A HREF="http://www.riscos.org">RiscOS is IMHO one of the most optimized operating systems ever. It usually comes in 4-8MB ROM from which he boots in a few seconds.
    It includes an excellent GUI and whatever you need to start work (TCPIP stack, Draw, Paint, Editor, tools, etc.).
    It is the only 100% Plug'n Play Platform I have ever used and, most of all, as it is fully modular, whatever you dislike in this system can have its original ROM module be replaced with one of your RAM modules.
    Now, if you consider that RiscOS has only been ported to specific architectures such as Acorn Computers [acorn.com]' which implement the excellent ARM [arm.com] processor then it is obvious why this product is so power-efficient.
    Now, an even more interesting case would be to implement a RiscOS platform around a forthcoming Amulet [man.ac.uk] asynchronous processor which hardly consummes a single milliwatt when on idle.
    --

  • Re:RiscOS, of course... (Score:3)

    by mirko ( 198274 ) on Sunday July 15, 2001 @01:53AM (#84558) Journal
    Cooperative multitasking is not a real problem if you are not considering RiscOS stations as servers.
    IMHO, if the Wimp (RiscOS GUI - a FLA for Windows-Icons-Menus-Pointer) is so responsive (and I doubt there is anywhere a so full-featured responsive GUI) it is because Acorn aimed it at the end user which is not a bad concept.
    If you consider what RiscOS platform excell at, then you won't need real-time multitasking. Of course, now their technology may now seem obsolete but I still make an heavy use of my RiscPC as no other environment can provide me with such optimal and ergonomic tools, especially when it comes to DTP.
    The "death" of Acorn was not its community's and there are still lots of unique concepts which come from them.
    Look at ROX [sourceforge.net], for instance...
    Anyway, I'd also like to say that some "multithreading-like" is still possible under RiscOS as the fact switching betwen apps is not that optimal doesn't mean we are monotasking.
    Though we still are far from what Unices may offer, in the user's point of view we have here quite a solid and sufficient solution.
    My company [eqrd.net] considers using it as the low-level layer for our Java multithreaded platform (our 50kB JVM, Zhaba is available for free on our web site)...
    --

  • Makes sense (Score:3)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Saturday July 14, 2001 @07:34PM (#84559)
    Using a RISC architecture makes sense if you look for low power consumption : that's the idea behind the design of the Hitachi SH3 and SH4 processors, which require very little power and don't heat up much when they run. I don't think there will ever be a power-efficient x86 processor (even the Crusoe is a power-hog compared to many RISC processors).

    Incidently, I wonder if they're running their webserver on this board, because it's very very down right now : Slashdot effect or lack of sun ? :-)

  • I love this idea. I am very interested in projects like this which aim to give information tools to those in cultures who don't yet have access to these sorts of things that we do.

    However, there is one drawback: at a price tag of $1000 US, even I couldn't afford it right now, and I make more in a month than many entire villages in the third world do.

  • Link broken (Score:5)

    by Hyperbolix ( 214002 ) <hyperbolix@@@gmail...com> on Saturday July 14, 2001 @07:20PM (#84561) Homepage Journal
    Here is the real one:
    Click here [explan.co.uk]
    or for you cut/pasters:
    http://www.explan.co.uk/hardware/solo.shtml

    -Hyperbolix
  • Are they going to invent geeks that like sunlight to use the thing too?
  • Oh sure, that has a small foot-print and performance requirements...
    But wouldn't it be n times more fitting if it were running SunOS?



    Just a thought.
    ~
  • wow, 3 digit id...

  • This is going to be a Sun computer.
  • ...do you need a backlight if it's a solar powered computer? Hmm.....
  • 12v*7200coloumbs(2 amp/hours)=86400 joules in the battery.

    8.5w*1hour=30600joules (per hour)

    86400/30600=~2.8235294117647058823529411764706 hours of operation off one battery.

    That'll last you a while, considering that you should be sleeping for about 8 hours. That means you'll only have to turn it off an hour before bed(at the equinox), and by the time you rise, it will be operational for an additional day. However: (10w-8.5w=1.5w->5400 joules of charge per hour-> 16 hours to charge!!)

    Looks like someone hasn't done math on this!

    You better not use all your charge, or on an overcast day, you'll be SOL! It takes 16 hours to charge!

  • On further consideration, they should change to a 12w or 15w panel, which would eliminate the problem: A 12w would fix it, as 3.5w would only require about 6 hours (6.8571428571428571428571428571429) to recharge the full thing.

    Of course, increasing the battery size by a half wouldn't hurt at all either, and batteries are relatively cheap compared to integrated circuits etc.

    That would give it 6 hours of capacity (roughly) which would mean that one could operate about 4 hours a day if given only 3 hours of sunlight, and even more if given the solar panel only 1/9 wider/longer to get 15w.

    That would allow about 1-2 ratio of sun to usage. That would make it useful in areas like mine, where we only get a few hours of sunlight on average. Rain sucks.

  • In the ocean acoustics world, many experiments
    are underwater for up to 9 months at a time (such
    as ice covered waters in Greenland Sea).

    One can make an acoustic receiver with analogue front end (such as pseudo-matched filter) with digital back end (ADC, signal processing routines,
    storage) designed around a Motorola architecture
    that runs with an average power consumption of less than .5 W.

    There are companies such as persistor (www.persistor.com) that specialize in these low power applications.

    Of course, the big drain is a screen which these
    underwater systems don't have. But did anyone notice that their 8.5W figure was an 'expected' one with the LCD display? I don't think anyone has seen this number in practice yet with a screen
    the size they are claiming, so I'm a bit suspicious. But maybe I misinterpreted their documentation.
  • Every literate person know that this is a view that is maintained by catholics (even stated by the pope). The catholics have many missionaries. Those missionaries will, if they don't think for themselves, preach that birth control is wrong.

    I think they extract this meaning from Onans untimely death caused by his reluctancy to make his dead brothers wife pregnant. And also to some degree Gods instruction to multiply and fill the earth.
  • A geosynchronous orbit(or any large orbit) with a slight tip(inclination) to it would miss the earth's shadow as it goes around. In other words it would go north or south of the earths shadow. At some point during the year it would go through the shadow because of the nodes of the orbit intersecting the earth-sun line. Also there is what they call a sun synchronous orbit(100 deg incl?) that basically always orbits over the same lighting conditions over earth. The best way to picture this is to imagine an orbit that stays fixed in space as the earth revolves around the sun. Only one time of the year will it have the same lighting condtions. Now incline the orbit until it precesses(rotates) as fast as the earth-sun line rotates. You could position this orbit to always be orbiting over the terminator(sunset sunrise line). Also for anybody who wants to know satellite orbits precess because of the equatorial bulge pulling on the satellite. This makes the orbit precess just like a toy top.
  • I used Amiga computers for almost 7 years, back when I was part of the 'demo scene'. Yes, AmigaOS was fast, the message passing system was fast because all it had to do was pass a pointer, as there was no memory protection. I can't remember the amount of times Voyager and IBrowse crashed my A1200. I remember when Netscape released their source, some people suggested porting it to AmigaOS; this, of course, was nothing but a very bad joke, imagine Netscape crashing and taking down the whole system with him. These days I run BSD boxes with WindowMaker, if you ask me I don't miss Amiga at all, the thing was dog slow for most serious work (i.e. using gcc). Sometimes I feel a bit of nostalgia and miss some of the really cool demos that were produced for it.
  • Shouldn't they be using Solaris?

  • Can you imagine... (Score:3)

    by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Saturday July 14, 2001 @07:36PM (#84574)
    ...running one of these things on a planet orbiting a binary star system?

  • Re:no you idiot (Score:3)

    by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Saturday July 14, 2001 @08:49PM (#84575)
    I may be an idiot, but what about the scientists behind the announcement that Astronomers Discover Planet Around Binary Star [spaceviews.com]
  • I suppose that the moisture farmers could use these little computers to keep track of their harvests, as well as check out the Mos Eisley web site to see what's happening in town that week.

    pressure/grep


    --------------------------------
  • >>intended for use within Third-world countries where its ultra-low-power design enables it to be used indefinitely away from sources of mains electricity.

    Now if we could design a box with solar powered, satellite internet access, the Talbian might have some problems enforcing their internet ban.

    pressure/grep


    --------------------------------
  • Way to call the fourteenth post dude!
  • This got me thinking, out of curiousity, what runs in a solar-powered calculator? Is there even a microprocessor?

    Also, the Palm only draws 3 volts, if I'm correct. Nothing major, but it certainly gets the job done for a good deal of applications (like email and even light web browsing).

  • It might be as revolutionary as..... THE SOLAR POWERED CALCULATOR! Seriously, though, the dream of moving to a tropical paradise, typing away at a laptop on the beach sounds so much closer now... Seriously, though, remember to bring along the sunscreen...
  • Glad I don't live in cave.
  • "The amount of times I've had apps go haywire and had to reset due to the OS using CMT is rather silly."

    This is due to memory protection, not to CMT. But this is quite rare. When an application behaves very badly, I don't use it any longer.

    Under Unix, though having pre-emptive MT, applications can also behave badly and completely freeze the machine; this is the case with Netscape for instance. You can also do a while(1) fork(); or something similar with lockfiles under NFS (both problems happened to me)...

    "It's not monotasking, but CMT is far from optimal. I remember talk about Wimp2 when somebody implimented PMT, but it had a lot of trouble with the rest of the OS and applications being designed for CMT."

    This isn't true. PMT isn't optimal either. Under Unix, a background task (even niced) can slow down the whole machine, and you can often get windows that are partly redrawn... Under RISC OS, tasks get interrupted at logical points, and the desktop generally has the priority, making it very responsive.

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