I was digging through the warehouse the other day and came upon VIA Wearable PC that was apparently part of a development project that never came to a useful end. The machine is contained in a belt, has a two-part flexible case for the CPU that sits in the small of the back, a lithium ion rechargable battery pack, and a 6.4" touch-sensitive LCD display that the user uses in the same fashion as a slate(a pen is the input device). To learn a bit more about it I disassembled the main portion of the unit. One section of the case has two PC card slots, one of which has a 2 Mbit wireless LAN card. The other slot has a 170MB hard disk. There was no battery charger with the machine, and the battery is long since dead, so I have no way of booting it. I put the hard disk in my laptop to see what was on it and it appears to have been running DOS 6.22. The other half of the case has the mainboard, which bears an AMD processor, and ESS audio hardware. The I/O connector from the display has audion in and out jacks on it, and there is also a serial port with a DB-9 connector on a short piece of cable. I contacted VIA for information about the unit, and was only able to come up with a few details. Apparently this series came with either a 486 or 586 processor, all of those with AMD processors being 586s, however, the speed is not known. They do not have any documentation related to the unit handy, and their website only has information on their current products. If anyone has any information(spec sheets, manuals, docs, etc) about this unit I would be very happy to hear about it. Most interesting would be the pinouts for the power connector so I could get it booted and see what it will do. Thanks in advance, Robert Some of the ideas bouncing around as what to do with it are to mate it with a gps and make a moving map display for an automobile, or perhaps a mobile mp3 player, or even a telemetry platform for an R/C aircraft.
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