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Precursor open mobile hardware up for pre-order for $450 and up (crowdfunding)

Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Sunday 1st of November 2020 09:40:28 PM Filed under
Hardware
Gadgets

Developed by bunnie Huang and Sean “xobx” Cross, the Precursor designed to be a pocket-sized, mobile device that gives owners complete control. If you have the technical know-how to inspect the code or program the device, you don’t have to trust that the chip designers, OS developer, or anyone else is protecting your privacy – all code can be inspected, and you can “compile your CPU” from source using the FPGA.

That said, the Precursor probably isn’t powerful enough to use as a replacement for a modern smartphone. It has modern features like a USB Type-C port, but out of the box the FPGA will work like a 100 MHz, 32-bit RISC-V processor. It can be configured to operate like many other older chips, but with a top speed of 100 MHz, the Precursor has the computing power of a 15-year-old smartphone, PDA, or handheld game console like a Palm Treo 600, BlackBerry 8700, or Nintendo DS.

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Precursor is a mobile, open hardware, dual FPGA development kit

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 3rd of November 2020 05:41:23 AM.
  • Precursor is a mobile, open hardware, dual FPGA development kit (Crowdfunding)

    Sutajio Ko-usagi PTE LTD has launched some interesting hardware on Crowd Supply over the years include Novena open-source hardware Arm laptop, and Fomu FPGA USB board.

    The company is now back with another project: Precursor, a mobile, open-source hardware devkit powered by not one, but two FPGA with Xilinx Spartan 7-Series FPGA, plus a super-low-power Lattice iCE40 UP5K FPGA for deep-sleep system management. The device also comes with a display, battery, and keyboard that make it looks like older Palm or Blackberry phones.

    [...]

    In theory, you can run anything you’d like on the FPGA core, but as you can see from the specifications, they’ve tested RISC-V soft cores on the chips. You may wonder why a mobile device would not come with a built-in microphone, and a speaker that only good for notifications. That’s because Precursor focuses on security beyond the anti-tempering measures. Since you can only communicate by plugging a headset, it’s impossible to be spied on when the headset is not connected.

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