First Post to Singleboard!

General
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Hello and welcome to Singleboard, I’m the creator Kevin and you may also know me as the creator of the Arduboy.

This community is a place for anyone to share an open source, feature complete, home-made computer. The focus is specifically on systems built with microcontroller dev boards attached to a display and input of some kind.

Arduboy started as my hobby, and became a business. Over the years, I had worked on some new platforms that were not compatible with the Arduboy, and thus, felt like it wasn’t the best place to share on the community. There are other platforms to share electronics projects (hackaday, hackster) but none that focus specifically on “computers” and certainly none offer the forum experience that seemed to be so valuable for the Arduboy community.

So this is supposed to be like the Arduboy community, without the Arduboy.

The next step is to create categories for some of the major controllers, ESP32, RP2040, STM… etc. The idea is if you are a creator of a platform you will be able to create a post to a subcategory your hardware definition. Basically just share the required modules to build the system, the pinouts and links to the documentation.

It’s great if the platform you are sharing already has a community of it’s own, link to that too! The goal is to create a catalog of homebrew game systems, so that they don’t end up in their own silo.

The ultimate dream is that this can be a resource for current and new hardware creators. Where we can ask each other questions and help each other learn for the goal of making new, personalized computers.

There are plans to help creators who are selling, to get additional visibility on the site. The concept is that someone who might currently sell on tindie could use this site as their own community for their platform without having to establish their own forum.

I’ll be making the new categories going forward and inviting creators to post their platforms. If you have a platform, and the category isn’t created yet please send me a message, or you can reply in this thread too.

Right now, it’s only me and the crickets - this might take a really long time to get going, it might not take off at all. At the very least it will be a useful sandbox for me to post my projects in long format that won’t fit on other social media. I hope you can find it useful for the same thing!

Most of all, I’m excited to see if this can even work!? Join along, share your thoughts.

What do you think Singleboard needs?

4 Likes
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Hello! :wave: I had an idea for an Arduino-based lil’ computer for so long, but I have like a billion projects and didn’t get too far along. :frowning:

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This website will inspire you to at least publish a prototype!

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Hey, thanks for making this place!

Relative to the global population there aren’t many people who dream about and work on open computers but as a friendly online community there are a lot of us.

I’m mostly pumped to chitchat here about electronics, manufacturing, and HCI. If we can figure out how to keep it friendly, I’d also love to discuss the reasons why we are driven to make open personal devices. It’s not the easy path to choose, after all. Terms like permacomputing, solarpunk, and verifiable hardware are bandied about and there are personal stacks like uxn floating around so it seems like an interesting topic.

Anyway, back to hacking. Thanks again for starting this board.

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Hello and welcome!

Thinking about why we do what we do is very important! For myself, it’s mostly to satisfy my own curiosity. I’m most engaged in a project when I’m not totally sure if it’s even possible. Once I’ve learned enough or done enough tests to know something is within reach, I can sometimes lose interest and motivation.

Knowing there are other people out there who are interested in my work can help give me the push to finish it. Especially with open source, once you put it out there into the world other people can continue to build on it.

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Hello Kevin!
Just like crait i have like 50 trillion projects but im currently working on an SBC radio communicator and computer, and i hope this website can teach me a little more in the field! (Im new to electronics, mainly a 3d printer)

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Welcome! If you get close to finishing one, you can make a post here and share your specification with others!

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Hi folks, saw your single board ESP32 comp on HaD, very nice work. I myself developed some OSHW myself a few years back, arduino shields and raspberry pi hats etc. glad to be here, looking forward to chatting with everyone!

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Hello new friends! I saw the SBC Alpha video and joined right away. I like to play with vintage Apple computers and hack them into something new. My current work is at http://drfrancintosh.wordpress.com.

Admittedly, I’m mostly a software guy, but I dip into hardware, too.

One Question for @bateske - is there a way to show the posts in reverse-chronological order? I find I have to scroll to the bottom to read the latest and it’s a minor inconvenience. I looked in the Settings/Profile area and couldn’t find a setting.

Thanks for creating this space and I’m looking forward to learning and sharing more!

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Hello and welcome! We need software people too, that’s my weak spot. Having a community around the Arduboy helped it’s software library grow to immense proportions, I’m not sure if we could expect the same thing here but it’s an attempt!

The forum automatically remembers the last place in a thread you read from, so if its new to you, you start at the top. I think there is a site wide admin setting to reverse this behavior but in general it’s better for new people to read the first post.

You can access the latest post by clicking here on the little mini scroll bar in the page:
image

That’s great feedback though, because I’m always hunting to click there. I wonder about making a “Scroll to latest” button at the top of the page would be helpful…