Clockwork announces that DevTerm open source portable terminal will soon be shipped

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At the end of last year, Clockwork announced a set of open-source portable terminals called DevTerm. DevTerm draws inspiration from the popular Tandy TRS-80 portable PC in the 1980s. Only A5 paper size, modular design, the “core module” can range from a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 Lite with 1 GB RAM to a six-core ARM processor with 4GB RAM (dual-core Cortex A72 + quad-core Cortex A53). There are five different configurations in total.

The “ext module” comes with a USB port, camera interface, speaker, and cooling fan by default. This module can also be replaced in the future, for example, a 4G/5G network module can be added. It also includes a 6.8-inch (1280 x 480 resolution) IPS display, a battery compartment with 18650 batteries (optional version without batteries), QWERTY keyboard with mini trackball, arrow keys and buttons of a gamepad, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and optional thermal printer and other components, which can be stored by Micro SD card.

Clockwork stated that it follows the concept of “open design”, and all 3D files of structures and related materials are released under the GPL v3 license. You can find the project files on Clockwork’s GitHub, customize your own parts through CNC or 3D printing technology, and create your own retrofit kits. DevTerm can run Linux, you can choose Clockwork OS, Debian, Ubuntu, or Raspberry Pi OS.

At present, Clockwork is also evaluating and testing more CPU architectures, such as FPGA+ARM, RISC-V, and even x86 architecture. In the future, it may bring users with different architecture kernels and provide richer choices. Clockwork recently stated that the long-awaited DevTerm open-source portable terminal will be shipped soon.

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