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Re: Cell Computing and Scaled down wearables [was Re: Juggling and state of the wearables art]h

On Tue, 29 Feb 2000,  wrote:

> As for the state of the art wearables, as another member said, CellCOmputing 
> makes a quality high-power device, but is expensive, 900 bucks for base 
> stuff, and the sales VP said he'd almost guarantee another 1000 bucks (us$ 
> mind you) to get it fully functional.

It depends what you mean by fully functional. I have a 486 CardPC that was 
$350 and put it on a mighty mite for another $350. This gives me standard 
connectors for IDE, FDD, VGA, LCD, keyboard, mouse, ethernet, parallel port,
and 4 serial ports. Note however that the 486 is no  longer in production. 
Also note that I didn't used the 486 in my  current wearable, I used a 133 
Mhz pentium. The costs for this setup were approximately as follows:

  133 Mhz Pentium CardPC plus 64mb RAM     $1000
  Mighty Mite Carrier Board + connectors    $400
  Intelec Dual PCMCIA pc/104 module         $160
  Parvus Power Distribution 1               $160
  5GB hard drive                            $300
                                             ---
                                           $2020

> In this box is a small RF VGA receiver, a RF Audio (FM unused freguencies), 
> and a RF serial port (picked it up for 70 dollars) transceiver. 

Wow! Please tell us more about these RF parts. Where did you get them?
What frequencies are they operating on? I have been looking for an RF 
VGA system but can't find it, I didn't know it exists. The RF serial 
port sounds very interesting. Is it an old product, or is it still 
available somewhere? What are you doing at the remote end?

> I am not done in developing this product for my own use, but am very pleased 
> with my results.

I am contemplating building a scaled down version also. My jacket wearable
is stuffed with features, and is therefore heavy and power hungry. I might
try interfacing the 486 CardPC directly rather that using the mighty mite
since it has controllers onboard for most I/O including IDE and VGA. 

> If anybody else is interested in this project, contact me.

I am definitely interested in the RF stuff, also the idea of making a 
small scaled down wearable that is more practical in situations where 
the large ones might not be. Do you have a web page? Pictures? Links?

  -- Doug

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