So its NetBSD then?
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This is probably the better plan, but Raspberry Pi is a flawed platform for this. One of the members of their foundation works for Broadcom, so they picked them as a vendor. Unfortunately, (and I know this from personal experience) Broadcom sucks. Their documentation tends to be NDA only and the Pi in particular has a firmware blob running as a shadow operating system.
The platform is open enough and stable enough to work, but I would pick something like Pine64’s offerings for putting an emergency computation kit together. For the A64, Allwinner has some GPL violations, but the Sunxi reverse engineering effort has done a pretty good job. And I think (I haven’t looked at them as thoroughly) their RockChip based boards are even better. Their single board offerings come with Raspberry Pi headers, so Pi compatible hardware and software should work.
In the medium term, I’m keeping an eye on SiFive’s RISC-V offerings. I have high hopes for those being well documented, extremely open platforms.
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This.
In a collapse situation, what are people going to use a computer for, sorting their mailing lists, business spreadsheets in a barter economy? One of my Palm PDAs could do that with minimal power.
What I’d really want would be a pile of ESP8266s, sensors and re-purposed solar lights so that I could have a security system in depth.
What people should be thinking about is how to justify having some geek tinker with old hardware all day rather than working in the fields, manning the walls, etc.
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And what what to pack with it?
- Some ad-hoc mesh networking system so that they could be linked would be good.
- A micro-branch of Wikipedia, ruthless trimmed down to the essentials. (Whatever they are!)
- Mail and message board software, with options to give/get USB sticks to/from the United Village Postal Service. (Like UUCP, only slower and with radioactive badlands.)
- There’s bound to be a pile of phones/tablets, so a wifi web server.
- Most SBCs have more than enough audio capability for a 1200 baud modem, so maybe instructions on how to
buggerjury-rig a CB or GMRS radio into a packet node for wider range networking?
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Packet radio drivers
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Modern microcontrollers run on microamps. Rigging up a power source is the easy part. Spin any DC motor with a windmill or river, put a regulator on it, and you’re done. Car alternators produce plenty of AC and have rectifiers and regulators built in for pretty clean DC out of the box.
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What interests me more is a relatively modern low-power rig capable of running off ‘dirty’ DC power (car battery, solar panel, whatever’s available - there must be a million ways to crank a truck alternator).
Stock it with a snapshot of all of Wikipedia, the top thousand or so projects from the major open-source repos, the top million or so books from Project Gutenberg (and make sure it includes instructors’ lab manuals for the undergrad curriculum in all the STEM disciplines - for century-old equipment as well as modern, and lots of elementary- and secondary-ed material), all of OpenStreetMap, and so on. That’s actually just a few terabytes - perfectly doable.
Host a cearch engine and server infrastructure on it. Computational resources for that are minimal. Drop it in an EMP-hard case.
A few hundred bucks worth of storage and a few dozen bucks worth of computation can do the whole thing. (Obviously you also need a front end - I’ve not thought as much about that.)
Presto, you’ve got document resources comparable to what a university library + a town public library could provide in the 1980s. Yes, you’re still missing the most important part - a librarian can save your arse! But a librarian needs stuff to work with.
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A simple Forth environment with compiler is quite a bit simpler internally than a modern compiler. It’s often attempted as a hobby project just as an excuse to learn Forth.
The ROM in Power Macs and Sun SPARCs was written in and extended by a flavor of Forth, OpenFirmware / OpenBoot PROM. Eons ago I wrote a simple text-based Freecell game in the boot PROM of a SPARCclassic.
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Yeah, the best way to learn Forth is to build your own. It’s also good for understanding the implementations of bytecoded languages, since those often have stack machines under the hoods.
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One method that’s been a disappointment has been windbelts: a frame, strip of elastic material (VHS tape), rare earth magnet and a coil. $5 materials for 3W-10W output, which would be great for a lot of low power projects.
Since they came out in 2008, there’s been little buzz. Either there’s a technical problem, like getting the tension just right for the conditions, or it’s legal due to the inventor’s patent.
Forth is also an excellent base language for small systems, and in fact was designed precisely for same. It’s a perfect choice for this use-case.
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Side note: Bob VE2PY and fellow ham Norm VE2BQS started a company selling commercial packet radio solutions. When NASA was doing the Sojourner rover on the cheap with off-the-self solutions, they bought Dataradios from their company for the digital link between the rover and the base, then replaced all the parts with space-rated stuff.
In The Martian, when Watney digs up Sojourner and base for a communications link, I laughed because I knew that they would be tracked down to have them come help with the compiled Forth firmware.
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And Ian Hodgson got cancelled after going to prison 30 years ago for sexual activity with students.
I knew the guy vaguely from the local ham club, he didn’t like me, which is probably good. From the articles about the trial, I think I knew one of the victims.
You can’t erase him from the book, but I have noticed his name missing from the history of amateur packet radio in the internet age.
This is for the apocalypse that happened in 1983 when Matthew Broderick blew up the world
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Ew, I don’t think I’d heard anything about that. I’d probably met him, but nothing sticks in memory.
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