Cheap Yellow Display Desires Of PDA

Everybody loves the Cheap Yellow Display (CYD) ESP32 dev boards, so why not deal with yours to slightly PDA? That’s proper: turn it into a Portable Digital Assistant and relive the glory days of Palm with this undertaking from [sau412].

For these readers who’re too younger to recollect, a PDA was principally a phoneless and cameraless smart-phone, and units working Palm Corporation’s Palm OS dominated the roost for a lot of the 90s and early 2000s. [sau412] hasn’t written an emulator or port of Palm OS; slightly he’s created his personal firmware for the ESP32-based CYD that’s impressed by the PDAs of yore, and has many options you’d have anticipated again within the day. That features a Gopher browser, to allow you to take a look at the undying alternative to the World Wide Web. There isn’t a general-purpose net browser, however there are RSS and Wikipedia readers, and what else do you need? At least you gained’t find yourself doomscrolling.

There are additionally a passel of video games and a BASIC interpreter, and the standard sensible issues like a calendar, calculator and make contact with listing. Everything from e book readers to translators, all of it by [sau421]. If you’ve obtained a CYD kicking round, you could possibly do worse than give it slightly PDA. Using the web-based flasher, we had it up and working in 5 minutes or so, however with out an SD card we couldn’t check all of the apps.

This is hardly the primary ESP32 PDA  that we’ve featured, however leaning into the CYD means it’s the only undertaking to duplicate.  If you’re jonesing for the unique Palm OS expertise on extra fashionable {hardware}, Pumpkin OS can get you going on x86 or ARM.