Driven by a microcontroller Lisp port, PotatoP is a laptop-from-scratch project by Andreas Eriksen which has the eventual goal of unlimited runtime via energy harvesting.

“The word ‘Potato’ is often used to describe an underpowered/poorly performing device. ‘This video must have been filmed with a potato!’ This device is intentionally underspecced to ensure long battery life,” Eriksen explains of the project’s unusual name. “The ‘toP’ suffix refers to the intended eventual laptop form factor. The suffix ‘p’ is used for LISP predicates — functions that return true or false, like ‘evenp‘ or ‘primep‘ for numbers. Is it a potato or not? It depends on your point of view!”

The PotatoP prototype, which is more of a luggable than a traditional laptop, is built using exclusively low-power parts. Its heart is a SparkFun Artemis module, which has a single low-power Arm Cortex-M4F core running at up to 96MHz and Bluetooth 5.0 Low Energy (BLE) connectivity. On this, Eriksen runs a modified port of uLisp, a Lisp designed specifically with microcontrollers in mind, dubbed PotatOS.

More information on the project is available in a Hacksterio article, on Eriksen’s Hackaday.io page, and the PotatOS source code published to GitHub under the permissive MIT license.