My latest toy arrived this week: A DevTerm A04 from ClockworkPi.
Quick description (if you don't want to follow the link and read for yourself):
This is a small computer with a TRS-80 Model 100 form factor. It runs Linux (Armbian) and uses a Raspberry PI compute module.
It comes as a kit (pretty much all snap together) that you have to assemble, but it's simple.
Even before it arrived, I was a little disappointed. When I purchased it, I thought I would be buying something about the size of my Tandy 102. The reality is that it's about 1/2 of that - meaning mostly that the keyboard is very cumbersome for my adult-size hands. No touch typing. All hunt-and-peck. So much for using it as a little laptop.
When it actually arrived, I was impressed by the ease of assembly and it worked right away.
So I copied over a bunch of stuff that I use on my other Pi's and found that many of the programs just don't work. "No problem," I thought. "I'll just recompile them." But no. I got some really strange compile errors (like duplicate definitions of objects). I didn't want to deal with those right now, so I just deleted them.
Unfortunately, some of them were the programs that I use to call BBSs and read BBS messages off line. So another thing that I can't use this toy for.
One cool thing it came with was a little thermal printer (think store receipt printer) and the paper that I bought for it came yesterday. So I gave it a shot. I didn't expect too much from it and it met my expectations. You won't want to use this for program listings, that's for sure. But it works and prints clearly.
It's a little frustrating. On one hand, I can't find any fault with what I purchased. It does exactly what it promised it would do.
On the other hand, I'm really struggling to find a place for this in my normal computer use.
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