Readers of a selected age may possibly keep in mind the Good Response XE, a handheld pc produced for academic needs in all-around 2009 but due to the fact discontinued. Presently available quite cheaply as a final result (we have witnessed the opportunity to get a box of 32 units for much less than $300) they are becoming fantastic targets for experimental hacks. Ingenious hacker chmod775 has turned an XE into a fully useful Linux terminal laptop, as highlighted by Hackaday.

The concept of the Sensible Response XE was that academics could compile a exam or other evaluation on a host Computer system (a Pentium 4 was expected, or an early Intel Mac) then distribute it to a fleet of XEs by way of IEEE 802.15.4 very low-power wireless, the standard employed these times in Zigbee and other home automation benchmarks. The XE almost certainly has much more processing energy than a Hue lightbulb, but its ATmega128RFA1 microcontroller and wireless transceiver unit is not precisely heading to run Crysis.

Pupils answered the issues on their terminals, and been given instant comments as to whether or not they ended up suitable or completely wrong, while the teacher acquired all kinds of stats about pupil general performance. 

Experimenter chmod775 has turned an XE into a entirely practical Linux computer, albeit command line only, by loading a terminal emulator on to the ATmega128RFA1 and hiding a NanoPi Neo Air in the battery bay the place 4 AAA cells when sat. This causes anything of a energy deficit, which is preset by introducing a USB electrical power offer. 

Chmod775’s images demonstrate the NanoPi Neo Air jogging Ubuntu 16.04 without having breaking a sweat on its Allwinner H3, a quad-core Cortex-A7 SOC with 512MB of RAM. The Raspberry Pi alternative’s sq. type aspect helps make it a excellent fit for the battery bay, and chmod775 says he’s working with the device for JavaScript, C, and Python programming on the move.