Usually I blog about projects after I complete them, but in this case I think I’ll do so beforehand. I saw some postings earlier this year about a new board Adafruit’s working on, called the Fruit Jam. It’ll have an RP2350 core, two USB ports, a DVI port, and SD card slot, as well as audio hardware and some misc. switches, leds, and GPIO.

It got me thinking - this would be a really cool modern/retro computer platform. What kind of operating system could we cook up for this thing? It doesn’t have internet, so we’d need to come up with some kind of modem peripheral, (either WiFi or maybe just Ethernet) to offload the actual request logic so we could stream back request contents.

With an SD card to store a filesystem, we could store documents and programs there. I’m sure it’d be possible (no idea on speed), to implement an emulator of sorts to allow older systems like DOS to run on it. Maybe we could port DOSBOX to it?

Could we build a BASIC interpreter for it? What about running QuickJS? Or embed some Python interpreter?

Could we build an email client? What about some basic web browser?

The dual USB ports could maybe handle some user input, I wonder if this thing is fast enough to be able to support drawing some GUIs with a mouse.

Maybe I’ll code the whole thing in assembly (for legal reasons, this is a joke!).

Hardware / Enclosure

I’m thinking I’d want to use some kind of display panel that supports the DVI output, and 3d print or produce a case for it. I could go full CyberDeck / C64 route and not include a built in screen.

Personally, I think the all in one including a screen form factor would be cooler, I have a small screen panel laying around - I’d need to try and see if it actually supports the DVI mode required.

I’d likely include an SD card or other panel mount plugs to allow a user to plug in a keyboard, swap the SD card from a front panel (a-la floppy disks), as well as audio. Maybe it’d make sense to include speakers and an AMP?

It looks like we’d be able to get a decently sized SD card in there so maybe it’s not too important to hot swap it.

Unanswered questions

• How performant can we make a GUI with keyboard/mouse? It sounds like you need to bit-bang the USB ports to make them work.
• Can we figure out some kind of modem (perhaps a Pico 2 W) connected over serial to allow for internet access?
• How far could we take CircuitPython before needing to develop in C?
• Graphics performance

Fruit Jam Hardware

This is the current listing image, which sounds like it may change:

More to come!