I really like how their coreboard are set up. The current version is about the size of an apple TV. I wanted to get away from actually needing a touch screen so I've been working with a dev unit of a low power laser projector that also does depth scanning to allow for optional alerts and gestural interfaces. The unit I'm using is from this company Microvision. They have a couple retail products, I don't know if they even have the production capacity to do their depth sensing units at scale, but they'll sell you dev units if you email them.
People always want to use these things for watching movies or whatever, which they will make a 100" screen on the wall, but they are extremely low lumens, so I focus on short throw and an interface that only uses four colors. CYMK. Since it's a laser, it doesn't need to focus and blacks are absolute so it works pretty well.
I just got an Intel Realsense the other day and I'm hoping to move to that for depth sensing and just use MV's projection module. And their tools are great even if brand new mostly and need some help. It's a cool platform.
They bill the Firefly as good for AR installations and stuff and it has the ability to do synced stereo vision that is helpful for depth stuff, but I've found that to largely be a giant pain in my ass to pretend like I'm going to solve. That and mounting two CCDs really breaks my already pretty kludgy assembly.
Funny thing about most LTE modems, there' sa good hackaday article on this problem, but even though they are capable of PCM audio on chip, they don't give you access, so if you wanna do voice, you're stuck with crazy hacks or VoIP. There is a neat 4 modem board availible that also supports virtual sims (which I didn't even know was a thing and sounds exploitable) but or some reason has an audio bus that works with a couple models of modems. I might be getting some of the details wrong on this problem, I'll see if I can find the hackaday article, but a quick google search didn't turn it up. Voice communication isn't my favorite thing anyway, so VoIP or XMPP/WebRTC is fine with me.
For less hand waving interface I started with two of these power point mice that I got super cheap. They are bluetooth, have a reasonable accelerometer, a few buttons, and most importantly a thumb stick with a press mode so with two I've been working on a trainer to use the thumb sticks as a twiddler keyboard since there's enough combinations to do full querty and plus some.
Now that I've tested that out, I'm designing a controller myself, still faster and more interactive to use two, but I'm working on a pattern for easy one handed text entry.
I bought a set of Bone Conduction headphones that I liked except for their fidelity and how ugly they were so, I'm playing around with building something myself. Exciters are cheap and I think I can do better. What I like about bone conduction is that your ears are open and what you're hearing doesn't interrupt regular life. Ear buds are great for closing our the world, but that goes against what I want out of my "phone".
Basically I'm annoyed and overloaded by all the crap that all the tech around me blasts at us all the time. I think it's inelegant, annoying, and motivated by bullshit sales and ad tracking exploitation. Because of that no one has improved on shit in 10 fucking years. From my tech I want it to give me less, work with me to provide communication, stay the hell out of my face, but also I want to own my platform and know what it's doing. Most importantly, I'd like it to actually be freaking cool. We are essentially using the exact same device as the first iphone. That isn't because we can't do better, it's because it works to keep us in line, vendor locked, and ready to shell out for the next one.
So yeah, the "phone" is kind of big, especially with the battery, which is roughly the size of a Stephen King paperback, but it lasts forever and has an AC invert er which is handy sometimes. This prototype stuff isn't quite ready to be rugged and travel with me, but the goal is to get it down to something easy to even put in my back pocket, but at least in my backpack, but really all I'm interacting with is the twiddler and the headphones. If I'm working I can set the thing on my desk and I it can use color, motion, and clear, uncluttered text to share info with me.
Because I'm doing weird point cloud depth scanning, starting with an ARM platform has been a giant pain in my ass. There have been some powerful and small x86 platforms that have come out recently like the LattePanda, so I'm eyeballing that as the next move to speed up the software side of stuff. Also I've been playing with the LimeSDR, it's technically capable of LTE and tons of other stuff. Their package manager isn't up to snuff yet, but the next gen will be capable of ranges up to 5G. The dream with this pile of techno garbage is some sort of open source, not awful, mesh network phone that still can use your t-mobile account until your friends get enough SDR radios that we can just say fuck it to the telcos.
But to answer the question you probably have, my daily driver is an iPhone7 that I would be fine if it fell in the ocean. My brand new macbook pro had keys falling off and it's USB-C went out after 3 months, so I've left most of apple's ecosystem for good. All the parts for way cooler stuff is out there! We can totally just quit paying thousands of dollars for bullshit ad-slabs and take our communication back.
Sorry, I guess that was quite the barf. I've been working on this off and on going on 3 years now but haven't looked at it in months because of a new job. I forgot how much was going on with it. hah.
