I've been using it for a few months. Great project. I especially love adding i2c peripherals from M5. E.g. a bank of 8 rotary encoders.
Also love how absolutely minimal it is in size and if you didnt notice, the screen is a touchscreen. And they have a basic set of ui widgets.
Also interesting, the gfx lets you overlap sprites, bitmap, and text mode. You can tell the designers have lot of XP on 8-bit systems. And the bitmap is a little larger than the screen so you can do some superbitmap stuff. It's bot terribly larger, just a bit.
I havent been using it as much for its synth capabilites, ironically, but for making sequencers for external instruments. I believe it also has audio in...
What I love about this is the reduction in complexity compared to how something like this would typically be built today.
If I were to build a synth a year ago I probably would have used Rust compiled to WASM and running in the browser. This thing has a lot of the same functionality, but you have about -30 million lines of code for the OS, -30MLOC for the browser, and another -30MLOC for Rust/LLVM.
And that doesn't even get in to the cost of materials or power savings.
Obviously it's not apples to apples but it really makes me wonder how much of that stack we need for most programs.
I agree AI is interesting here. It raises the level of abstraction in a similar way to the OS/Browser/language, but it does so by depending on a lot of data, as opposed to depending on a lot of code.
Yes, I got a tour of their factory back in the day when I was editor for a number of IT-related magazines. Close to everything was made there in that factory from the metal housing for the machines to the circuit boards - photoresist, exposure, etching, cleaning, printing, conformal coating, through the pick-and-place machine, through the wave solder bath, testing and mounting in the chassis. In the Netherlands, in a relatively modest factory hall. If it could work then - and it did, for a while - it should be possible to do that now without the compulsive urge to outsource everything.
The thing about trademarks is that, if you want to prevent other people from using them, you generally have to still be using it yourself and be able/willing to justify to a court that you're still using it. (At least in most legal systems that I'm familiar with)
Since the original company both changed names and was subsequently liquidated in bankruptcy nearly 20 years ago... that seems unlikely. There's only so many names out there, and occasionally they get fairly recycled.
Looks interesting. I'm interested in the T-Deck Tulip CC and would love to use it for coding whilst im traveling. Any experience with using such a device for light programming?
If you're staying in python or another dynamic language it could probably work. Unfortunately I don't think there are a lot of native compilers that run on esp32s, though there are some[0]
It's seems like the Tulip could definitely be used for something like that, though you might have to write quite a bit of your own framework code in python.
Also love how absolutely minimal it is in size and if you didnt notice, the screen is a touchscreen. And they have a basic set of ui widgets.
Also interesting, the gfx lets you overlap sprites, bitmap, and text mode. You can tell the designers have lot of XP on 8-bit systems. And the bitmap is a little larger than the screen so you can do some superbitmap stuff. It's bot terribly larger, just a bit.
I havent been using it as much for its synth capabilites, ironically, but for making sequencers for external instruments. I believe it also has audio in...
Also the discord is helpful. 10/10
If I were to build a synth a year ago I probably would have used Rust compiled to WASM and running in the browser. This thing has a lot of the same functionality, but you have about -30 million lines of code for the OS, -30MLOC for the browser, and another -30MLOC for Rust/LLVM.
And that doesn't even get in to the cost of materials or power savings.
Obviously it's not apples to apples but it really makes me wonder how much of that stack we need for most programs.
I wonder the same thing a lot. I also wonder how AI will fit into this problem.
The cost of abstraction is always dependencies.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_Computers
Since the original company both changed names and was subsequently liquidated in bankruptcy nearly 20 years ago... that seems unlikely. There's only so many names out there, and occasionally they get fairly recycled.
https://github.com/shorepine/tulipcc/graphs/contributors
[0]: https://github.com/valdanylchuk/xcc700
https://livecode.com/
It's seems like the Tulip could definitely be used for something like that, though you might have to write quite a bit of your own framework code in python.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_Computers