This board is the first board I’m aware of that runs linux and is small enough to drop directly into a saber. It also runs on 3-6 volts, and has a 3v output onboard. Putting it on something proffieboard-sized might not be easy, but it wouldn’t have to be much bigger. We’d still need an STM32L4 to drive neopixels and stuff, but we wouldn’t need to worry about ram, styles and presets, because all of that would run on the main processor.
This thing doesn’t have a lot of ram, but maybe it’s possible to use the SD card as swap space, in winch case we’d be able to re-compile the OS on the chip itself, so all you would need to do is to drop a config file on the storage and wait. Potentially we could make on-hilt menus for every setting you could ever put in a config file…
The evaluation kit doesn’t seem to be available yet, but it has everything a saber needs, except for a motion chip it looks like…