> I might personally find it a lot more tempting to use a super DIY device (ie a baroque OS, unique input devices, etc.) if I could also make calls out to the public Internet (to read wikipedia? answer SMS? fetch any sort of map/transit info?)
A browser would be quite tough on such an embedded system, you would need to really think outside of the box. The issue is that a browser could easily need more space to render than is available, have tonnes of images, require JS, etc.
On my machine. the lightweight browser dillo is 852kB, and that doesn't include the shared libraries (I could 26 on my machine). It's not going to be easy to get a similar experience running.
> Feel free to pile on and tell me which devices I've missed..! :-) I'm sure there must be some out there, considering that "cell phone in a chip" is pretty much a whole category now ie the qualcomm snapdragon chips, mediatek, etc.
I'm hoping to add to the list of devices myself maybe next year. It's a very difficult space to operate in.
> ... (reading more about it) actually, is it true that design/certification of a small device that boasts a cellular module is a lot harder than an esp32/wifi-only board? which explains why there isn't a plethora of cell-internet-enabled devices?
For the most part you can get already certified modules, where the ESP32 is itself largely one of these modules (the small ones with the metal body on a thin PCB). I think cellular is mostly avoided due to the increase in BOM, and you're not easily going to get 4G/5G support.
I’m currently working on a browser targeting the T-deck in pure Rust. It’s effectively a text mode command line browser good for reading pages with links and nothing else. There just isn’t the ram for anything more. Interestingly, The slowest part is actually SSL connections.
See the other comment for a MITM large browser server: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45446991
To do everything onboard, maybe, just maybe, you could parse basic HTML/CSS and images. But the majority of pages would of course fail anyway without full support for every modern feature.
This seems like it could be useful: https://limpet.net/mbrubeck/2014/08/08/toy-layout-engine-1.h...
What you could do is the "opera mini trick", AKA one beefy server, shared between many users, used to run heavyweight browsers. The pre-rendered DOM from these browsers could then be optimized and compressed, HTMX / Liveview style, and sent to the device.
The key insight here is that most smartphones are idle most of the time, so such a server (or group of servers) would need far less processing power than all the smartphones it replaces.
Given a Mitmproxy trace, modern llms could probably quickly build you simple apps for most popular services, leaving the heavyweight browsers for the long tail.
Yeah, exactly. I think this could make browsing feasible for small embedded devices. I even had an idea on how to make Youtube possible too with a similar method.
Thanks for your reply! Good point re: browser but I guess that's where my excitement about the possibilities lies: I wouldn't mind an extremely under-resourced device. RSS feeds and text content could be sent (and wouldn't require specialized rendering), vector maps and points of interest or transit info could be super minimal in terms of bandwidth/rendering requirements, etc.
I think that I want a 5G tty qwerty terminal..? :-)
aka https://github.com/rastapasta/mapscii for maps, etc.
> and you're not easily going to get 4G/5G support
Sorry, what do you mean by that? In the sense of 4G not being that supported vs 3G? As in the chips aren't available? Or 4G service is hard to find..?
Cheers
> I wouldn't mind an extremely under-resourced device. RSS feeds and text content could be sent (and wouldn't require specialized rendering), vector maps and points of interest or transit info could be super minimal in terms of bandwidth/rendering requirements, etc.
A compromise might be to send the traffic via a proxy that pre-resizes images, renders content and chops it up into a manageable format for a resource constrained device.
> I think that I want a 5G tty qwerty terminal..? :-)
> aka https://github.com/rastapasta/mapscii for maps, etc.
For resource constrained devices, it's probably easier to render the vector graphics. There's a few open end points out there that could make it feasible for basic navigation.
> Sorry, what do you mean by that? In the sense of 4G not being that supported vs 3G? As in the chips aren't available? Or 4G service is hard to find..?
You can get them, but they are harder to interface with than the existing 2G/3G chips. Whoever takes on the challenge might have to do some work reverse engineering how to correctly speak to the modem, for example.
WML is (needed) back?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language
It would help, but the majority of pages out there are completely unusable without Javascript.