tulipcc VS beepy

> At the risk of being shouted down, this is another one of those products that looks great on impulse buy, but when you try to use that tiny keyboard and screen to do any real work with it, the chore of use becomes apparent.

I purchased one on impulse after this HN post, and some notes so far:

* Keyboard is a hell of a lot smaller than expected. I have small fingers and even this is a bit of a challenge for me. I very much doubt anybody will be coding on this thing. I am thinking mostly to use it as a way of making brief notes and reading RSS feeds.

* The screen is fine, it's something you can live with.

* I installed tulipcc on it (micropython), definitely the right choice to getting started on it quickly.

* I tried to print a case [2] but my printer is not good enough, I think I will send them off to China to be printed on an SLA printer.

[1] https://github.com/bwhitman/tulipcc

[2] https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6287501

Source + schematics here

Author here — happy to answer any questions! This is more of a "I'm working on a new project" rather than an official release, the extension itself is still a work-in-progress. A link to the project: https://github.com/asg017/sqlite-vec

I have a pretty specific vision of what v0.1.0 of this extension will look like, but it'll take a few more weeks to get there. This blog post was more for letting users of sqlite-vss (a previous vector search SQLite extension I wrote) know what will be coming next. There will be a much bigger release when that is ready.

But in general, I'm super excited to have an easy embeddable vector search alternative! Especially one that runs on all operating system, in WASM, mobile devices, Raspberry Pis, etc. I personally I'm trying to run a lil' semantic search app on my Beepy[0], which is a ton of fun to play with.

[0] https://beepy.sqfmi.com/

This is the hardware that I wish Beepy had: https://beepy.sqfmi.com

By the way, does anyone know why all of these devices use the Arabic BlackBerry keyboard? Was there a particular surplus of this layout?

This is quite small, but you get Linux running on a hard to find Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. https://beepy.sqfmi.com/

Hey there, just saw this kit, that makes a Zero board the brains of a handheld console. The thing is that the kit was just about 50 units made.

Beepberry by SQFMI looks like a nice cyber deck, but can't find any good videos on YouTube for this. just this YouTube short by JeffGeerling

The Beepberry isn't far off: https://beepberry.sqfmi.com/ looks like it's got a Blackberry keyboard. Missing LTE, but since it's just a raspberry pi zero, you could probably hack one in directly to a serial port on the GPIO. Needs a case though, but 3D printing one shouldn't be hard.

But I think the general market for this kind of device is really tiny; phones and tablets can do this pretty well, and appeal to general consumers

I am not sure but from Beepberry repository, the 3rd step about the setup script installs a kernel module to drive the LCD screen. The device tree file lists compatible chip including Broadcom SoC bcm2835, bcm2708 and bcm2709.