Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/09/09/803397.html
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Thanks, but sadly at that price tag, I hate it.
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Needs a better UI, I propose https://arwes.dev/
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Nice, reminds me of the OQO, wish that had succeeded more.
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Heck yeah, thanks for this! I love me a good futuristic aesthetic, always wanted to get into the custom-UI scene that tools like RainMeter provided.
Fun anecdote: I wrote one of the first articles on non-rectangular UI in the 90’s, published in Visual Basic magazine. The code was more C++ than VB, since I had to import so many DLL functions and overhaul the windows message hook.
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There’s no way that case costs $300 to print.
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Yeah, having the line there for a hinge, and then seeing that the thing itself is 1 dm thick kills it really soundly. I guess the idea is that you can fit an arbitrary clot of project ‘hats’ from the last decade in neatly, but around there packing it (or a proxy) in dung and leaving it in the sun beats $350 worth of 3D Plastic Printing Services.
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Hackable, unlike all those boring regular Raspberry PI computers! And it has a win button!
I assume they have given it a battery, and a battery charger, and soft cables across the hinge. Include the labor needed to put the thing together and I can believe $300.
I have been wanting to build a pi-based portable into an instrument case. I would have to integrate a monitor and possibly build some power management for that. The costs build up.
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I like the idea and the form factor. If it were properly ruggedized (i.e. dust proof and at least water resistant, ideally waterproof) and had a more practical input device rather than a touchpad (which you can’t use with gloves, or when wet or muddy) I would actually have a few real world application scenarios for this.
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If you print the case youself (or ask a friend to print it for you), the only expensive component is display, which costs 60 Canadian dollars.
If you use services of some 3D printing company, it probably will. If you do it youself, it’ll be probably less than 10$ depending on filament used.
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I can deal with a small display, but the small keyboard is a non-starter for me. CLI operations would be torture. I tried on of those EEE PC things back in the day, and it was in the donation pile in months due to the pain of trying to type on it.
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The case itself might use $5 worth of filament, and take a day or two to print.
They must be including the other components inside the case in the cost.
Hell, I paid less than $300 for my first 3D printer.
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Yeah okay but getting a product to market is expensive. You have all kinds of overheads. Insurance, testing, marketing, packaging, labor costs, profit to return to investors.
It all adds up and I don’t think $300 is too much.
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I have EEE PC (1005px model) and the keyboard isn’t all that small. I wrote my PhD thesis on it 
Especially for a niche product.
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Well, I went to their website: http://yarh.io/yarh-io-mki.html
They have a list of components, links to sources for those components, and a link to the stl files for the case. Looks like there are a dozen components for the case. I haven’t sliced 'em, so I have no idea how long they would take to print or how much filament would be used, but they mention that 3 different types of filament are used.
I saw no price for premade cases, so maybe they had theirs printed by a shop somewhere, as 74hc595 suggested.
Not disputing the costs of marketing, etc; just that the only products they had for sale were prototypes. The one that was left was a bit over $600, and is to help finance further projects.
So I am betting that as a purely DIY project, the cost would be far less than $300 for the whole shebang. Unless you don’t have a 3D printer at your disposal…
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Nice, but I cringe at all the layers piled on top of X-Window to make it work.
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