Project sonoko, x11 xterm home-made

[Carlo Pisani]

> > We are also developing a RFID card to unlock/lock the machine (still
> > experimental, and we are going to use an old 68HC11 board for this ...
> > it's 80s technology)
>
> Are you developing your own technology?  Or are you re-using standard
> technology that's been around for a while?

our own technology. RFID at 125Khz. We already have a prototype. A
good occasion to play with analogic electronics and also a good
occasion to use ICC11 v6.5 on a HC11 board, and ICC11 was a good C
compiler in the 90s.  (we are also supporting gcc-11, but it's ... not
so good)

> I think Sun (and others) had X terminals that had smart card slots in
> them.  This sounds functionally quite similar, just a few substitutions.

yup, SunRay uses a smart-card, but it's not contactless, and it's a
true-smart card, whose protocol looks not so funny to play with
(except if you are paid for doing it). SmartCards are safer anyway

We want to use RFID Smartcard-shaped cards. The looks like a credit
card, but they have an RFID capsule inside. Therefore we only need a
coil to read it.

Simply, and funny.

this (1) a commercial product you can use as a reference ... the chip
is a common avr8
(1) http://www.downthebunker.xyz/wonderland/chunk_of/stuff/public/projects/sonoko-x11/rfid/hz1050/

> That in and of itself does not make what you're doing bad or a waste of
> time IMHO if you're having fun (other than injuries), learning, reducing
> ewaste by reusing things you have, well that all sounds good to me.

Precisely! We neither have a CNC, nor a 3D printer, and we want to
recycle polycarbonate frames. We got a lot of industrial waste. It
would be a shame trashing them.

> I was sort of asking because part of me would like to build something
> that looks like a DEC vt420 with a look alike (but physically smaller)
> case with an LCD (?) display.  I've thought about running a Pi and
> running XTerm.  But that's a pipe dream project for some other time.

it can be done easily. Our boards run U-BOOT as firmware, and Linux as
the kernel.
On your RPI you just need to manage a custom kernel on a custom rootfs.

There is a Dude on the internet offering a small Indigo1 case with a
LinuxBoard inside.
It's a cool project. The case is 3D printed.

The only "tricky" part is setting the builder. We chose catalyst
because we also support Gentoo on MIPS4, MIPS32, HPPA2, PPCBE, thus
it's a "natural" choice, but there are also builders like Angstrom and
OpenWRT which allow you to have ucLibc and similar. We are using glibc
just for our convenience (since we already have a working and tested
glibc-profile)

Anyway, we'd like to have a nice WindowsManager. We are using "mwm"
which is super light and very classic (my Tektronix XP217 uses it),
but we are going to evaluate "fvwm": it seems it's light but offering
good "visual features"; we'd like to reconfigure it with the look&feel
of 4DWM (SGI IRIX) ...

maybe it's possible, who knows :D