Project Lifeblood!
also Stripe Sessions 2025!
2025-04-21
written by Niko Viau-Chow-Stuart (Founder)
hello vorers! if you've been following the askLyphe development closely (i.e. on our discord server), you may have noticed that we've been a bit silent for the last week or two.
this is because for the last few weeks, we've been working on a very secret project which i'm very excited to announce!
Project Lifeblood
lifeblood is a very small pcb computer, about the size of a business card, with a usb-c jack that provides
power and exposes the operating system as a serial device!
it uses a very limited risc v microcontroller with only around 10kib of RAM, and runs a very minimal
multitasking operating system that we call "lifebloodOS",
and because of these imposed limitations, components alone cost just under $1 per board!
you may be wondering why we've made such a limited and basic computer, and that's for a very simple reason:
we will be using lifeblood computers as business cards!for 2025, we were invited to Stripe Sessions, a technology conference run by Stripe (our payment processor), that normally costs like $600 to attend. (which means, yes if you somehow have $600 to spare and live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you can meet us!)
we figured that we might as well use this chance to have some fun, and since we don't have any business cards, we figured we could have some fun with those! (:
if anyone reading this is somehow actually also going to this random tech conference, then we'll be giving away these lifeblood-based business cards for as long as we have any left!
however, if you aren't going then we also plan to sell lifeblood boards on our website!we plan to hopefully sell them for around $5 a piece, although this price may change depending on component cost changes due to the stupid fucking tariffs that are being applied by the US.
of course, once they're released to the public, we'll also be open sourcing everything from the pcb designs to the operating system, so if you don't want to pay us then you can also build your own from scratch! :D
more details about both the board and the operating system will be announced closer to the planned release date of May 6, so stay tuned!
askLyphe updates
although this project has taken up quite a bit of our time, we definitely haven't abandoned askLyphe!
we're still working hard to get askLyphe to a state in which we can release a public beta, and internally we use askLyphe as our main search engine! for those who have private beta access, we'll still be maintaining the private servers, and making sure that any downtime is as short as possible.
as always, feel free to support us on liberapay if you like what we do! we're incredibly thankful for everyone who has donated so far, and as such we plan to send anyone who has donated before may 6 a free lifeblood board if you email us!
as always, thanks for reading and happy voring! :3
image made by @cathodegaytube!