Post by @dirtycommo@anticapitalist.party

2026-10-31 13:58 UTC

Thinking about the people&#39;s permacomputer project, as always. Perhaps it is time to do a broader exploration of the different microcontrollers on offer today, instead of continuing down the AVR path without doing any further checks. It is very important to the project that the hardware that it ends up developing for a BASIC computer is as inexpensive as possible. Displays and keyboards are about as expensive as the MCU. This is a problem. Some sort of conspectus would be good at this stage.

Replies (2)

@dirtycommo@anticapitalist.party 2026-11-01 16:07

Okay I did the conspectus. These are the results of my searching and weighing things up: Arduino Due https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005010551832566.html Raspberry pi pico https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005013255261668.html These will support the broadest range of features of Stefan's BASIC. A pity that I wasted money on these Atmega1284s, but I have not damaged them, and they may prove quite useful somehow in the future. These displays are also interesting: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/33015586094.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001223564156.html #retrocomputing #Permacomputing

Open ##5432657
@pho4cexa@tiny.tilde.website 2026-10-31 16:09

@dirtycommo@anticapitalist.party i don't know if these 8051 core micros are still cheap or available but have you seen this article from 2019? https://hackaday.com/2019/02/17/how-to-program-a-really-cheap-microcontroller/

Open ##5432658