Raspberry Pi

RISCBoy fits on a $65 prototyping board, but nothing above the silicon was borrowed: a custom RISC-V core that passes the official compliance and formal-verification suites, a from-scratch graphics pipeline, and a complete KiCad PCB layout, all written solo in Verilog.

The thread placed the author fast — Wren also built the RP2040's DVI video trick — then produced a bigger reversal: the founder of an open-silicon shuttle service says a version of RISCBoy already got taped out as real hardware. He still doesn't know if it works.

A 20W emergency hand-crank charger feeds a Pi 5 through a custom capacitor board that buffers about 20 seconds of power. A 350M model hits ~49 tokens/sec; idle draw is 4W, and an answer-plus-speech burst spikes toward 5A.

You can feel the inference load in your wrist: when the model and text-to-speech run together, the crank physically stiffens. Half the thread wanted to buy one; the other half pictured humans on hamster wheels for the AI overlords.

Commenters point out you can buy an M4 Mac Mini or an N100 mini-PC for similar money — with more capability. One called it 'memory with a side of compute'.

The bleakest prediction: with RAM shortages and inflation, $350 might look like a good price a year from now.