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Re: Soon-to-be wearable? Advantech PCM-5822 based

 wrote:

> PCM-5822 is more or less my final choice at this stage from the reports I
> have received. The Advantech site says that the TV-Out only supports
> Windows 95/98/NT so I presumed it requires drivers.

As I said before, no special drivers are required on linux for the TV out
port. It appears to use the same graphics controller (CS5530) to feed all
of the video output ports (analog VGA, digital LCD port, and TV Out). Yes
it feeds into a chrontel scan converter, but on my system no special 
drivers are needed. I can plug directly into a TV and it works fine. The
TV out port must be turned on in the BIOS though, and the system seems 
to need to be attached to a TV (or whatever) at boot time to enable the 
TV out port. I can't imagine why windows would need a special driver for
this, but then ... oh never mind.     

> I'd be surprised if the composite did not just pumped out the same as the 
> VGA signal regardless of video mode (text / vga). At least that's what 
> the one on my ATI card does.

Yes it does. It uses the CS5530 (MediaGX companion) to produce the VGA
signal and just runs it through scan conversion. I've never seen a scan
converter that needed any drivers ...  

> In regards to the GT-270 the resolution isn't a scratch on genuine 640x480,
> but people were reading 640x480 on the M1 running 320x240 with increased
> font sizes weren't they?

The M1 is not really 640x480, its 320x240. The hardware driver just 
shrinks down the VGA data to QVGA. The net effect is that is does 
NOT look like VGA, regardless of what the Tekgear web site says. I 
saw a page on the Charmed site that talked about watching DVD movies
with an M1, I had to laugh, whoever wrote that is dreaming. Nothing 
against the M1, but its 320x240. At this resolution, its pretty 
useless for any x-windows or anything graphical. Its basically a 
very good text display. Yes people are displaying text on them but 
they are using SVGATextMode software to display larger fonts, usually
something like 15-18 lines of 40-50 characters of text. 

The GT-270 is neither VGA or QVGA, its NTSC. The NTSC standard uses
525 horizontal lines, and the picture usually occupies only 480 of 
those horizontal lines. For broadcast info (which NTSC was designed)
the effective resolution compared to pixels in VGA is far less, and 
because of this text looks very fuzzy. Try plugging that desktop 
ATI card w/TV port into a television and display text. That's what 
text will look like on the GT-270. Not very good.

> PLM-S700 was my initial choice, but from what I have read it sold for
> US$1000 or so (that's way out of my price range), nobody sells them in
> Australia anymore and I haven't seen any on eBay anywhere in the last two
> months.

It also uses power like crazy, much more than Cy-Visor.

> Daeyang Cy-Visor is way too expensive again, and from what I've seen it's
> huge! the official photos are very clever at never showing a profile view
> but there's no way I'd be able to make it look reasonable (let alone close
> to covert) for wearable use.

PLM-S700 is also large, the size of the headpiece and driver box are
roughly the same as Cy-Visor.   

> GT-270 looks like about US$275.00. If I have to pump up the font sizes then
> so be it. NTSC resolution isn't too far off 640x480 is it?

Yes, its way far off. Again, plug your ATI card into a TV, look at a 
VGA monitor and compare to the TV. I have tried this with three different
scan converters, several televisions, and also a 6.4" NTSC flat panel.
There is no comparison to VGA. Yes, you can read the text, but I would
not want to read it all day. 

> If the previous note on this topic was to warn me that I am going to 
> end up squinting at this thing for the next year or two then please 
> try and slap some sense into me again and I'll buy an LCD to strap 
> onto my wrist or something...

Compare your TV to your VGA monitor (displaying text) and decide. 
You'd be better with the M1 for text, but then its pretty much 
useless for x-windows. Cy-Visor or PLM-S700 do full 800x600 so 
no problem with these (other than cost, size, bulk, weight, power).
The wrist LCD idea is not bad actually ... here's my old one.

http://home.earthlink.net/~wearable/roaming.html

But at 4x20 lines of text its pretty difficult to do much more 
than display a menu of functions. It would be too small for doing
a console login. I'm looking at trying a VFD from Noritake that 
that can do 16 lines x 42 characters of text. Now that would be 
usable. I will make it a small tty serial terminal in conjunction
with twiddler as keyboard. A normal VGA display console renders
80x25 = 2000 characters per screen. The Noritake VFD will do 
16x42 = 672 characters or approx 1/3 of the text real-estate. 
This is roughly equal to what people do with SVGATextMode on 
the M11 with console login.      

> From what I read InfoLithium cells are the only choice for wearable
> batteries.

They are popular, but they are certainly not the only choice. 
You can use any battery you like if you're willing to carry 
the weight. NiMH cells are reasonable. I think that NiCad and
lead acid are just too heavy. 

> They are pretty expensive, I'll only be able to afford one. I
> had a look on eBay and there are millions new and used available (not one
> in Australia of course) although I can't tell what the difference between
> the versions / models are.

Laptop batteries are available on ebay for cheap all over the
place, and chargers are available too. I can't really figure 
out why everyone is spending tons of $ on infolithiums. For
the small increase in energy density its not worth it to me. 

> Speech recognition was high on the priority list, I didn't think the CPU
> time would be a concern, but I'll have to enquire about the 300Mhz version.
> Has anybody used any distribution of Linux on these advantech PCM-5822
> boards? Are drivers available for the TV-out, sound and video cards (and
> pcmcia?) etc...?

Yes, plenty o testing with redhat and slackware. Everything works.
Its just an ISA bus so all of the IDE, serial, parallel, usb, and
PS/2 ports are the same as a PC. The video and audio use the 
Cyrix MediaGX CS5530 chipset, video works with the SVGA X server 
on XFree86 <v4 and works great with >v4, where its autodetected. 
The audio works fine with the standard SB16 driver.        

/sbin/modprobe sb io=0x220 irq=5 dma=0 dma16=5 mpu_io=0x330

I have tried the USB ports on linux with the Twiddler2 (with 
the PS/2 to USB converter) and it works fine.

> Can't see the Cisco 340 Aerolan stuff anywhere online in Australia, I
> suspect a few phone calls would reveal it somewhere.

I bought Cisco 340s for $150 each, which was cheaper than Proxim.

> I'll add a notebook hard drive to it. No floppy / cdrom or others of
> course.

The PCM-5822 comes with cables for IDE (44-pin) and floppy drive
for booting (just so you can load a kernel and install). I made
a special cable for 44-to-40 pin IDE so I can boot from CD-ROM. 
I discovered that Advantech sells these cables too. Also, you 
can use PCMCIA CD-ROMs, they work fine with PCM-5822.

  -- Doug

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