On Wed, 5 Sep 2001, Melanie McGee wrote: > I'm looking into boards/processors etc for my wearcomp, and noticed that > there is a new (?) product from ampro called EnCore. Is anyone familiar with > this product? The Ampro EnCore was discussed on this list late last year. However, back then the EnCore line was only the Pentium266 Encore 500. It looks like they recently introduced three new configurations: http://www.ampro.com/html/encore.html * low-power MIPS (2 watts -- max!) * low-cost 486 * high-performance PIII(850MHz!)/Celeron > Pros/Cons? They all accept PC/104+ cards (PCI interface) -- could be very handy. The high-performance model has onboard audio, a nice feature. Also, ultra 100 DMA EIDE, 10/100 ethernet, and 512MB SO-DIMM capability for its single SO-DIMM slot. It is (or was, anyway) more expensive than similar spec Advantec ware. Ampro is typically not the low-cost leader, but has a solid reputation for reliability. Here's a message from Doug posted last November (regarding the EnCore500: http://wearables.blu.org/wear-hard-00/20005480.html snip --- Re: frame grabbers From: Doug Sutherland Date: Michael wrote: > I mis-read the specifications. The Ampro enCore 500 is > sginificantly more expensive than the Advantech PCM-5822. > The quote I got for the encore 500 was $725 for the board I think that Advantech is spoiling us and also is blowing the doors off almost all competition in terms of price for an all in one multimedia SBC. It might be hard to find another one as cheap. The $725 price for enCore 500 is not bad but ... > plus $349 for the manual and cables This is insanity. > recommendation to purchase the $999 developers kit. Nonsense. I assume you won't be writing your own BIOS for the hardware, so you will never need the developers kit. > Advantech on the other hand was $410 including the > cables. Does anyone know of a board that has similar > specs as the Advantech or Ampro with a PC/104+ bus > and a price tag closer to the Advantech price? See if you can get a price on the DSP Design TP300. It's nice and small but has MediaGX audio/video. This mated with a PC/104+ frame grabber would be 4x4x1 inches, would have awesome video, and if we can figure out how to load these NS CX5530 linux drivers it would also have full duplex audio. http://www.dspdesign.com/tp300prod.htm -- Doug --- snip > Warnings? The 850MHz PIII configuration should draw a substantial amount of power. They haven't yet disclosed power-consumption figures in their PDF brochures for any of the configurations except their MIPS version which, as I said, draws 2 watts maximum (drool). The PDF brochures say they are designed to interface to "a custom baseboard" (carrier board) which I take to mean they don't offer ready-made carrier boards. But I guess you don't need one since you can apparently just use their $349 connector cable set -- *I guess*. > Any input that would help me get the best possible system together would > sincerely be appreciated. Advice: Unless your expectations are *very* low, you should expect to have to compromise. What are your expectations, BTW? If you've been on the list for a little while, then you've probably heard this: The archive is a good teacher. The archive search engine is a bit slow so I just use normal, web-wide search engines and narrow them down to wear-hard messages by including the phrase *wear-hard* in quotes. For example, try searching for *encore* now -- you'll get some hits from last ~November. -Chris -- Subscription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" toWear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.blu.org please, Please, *PLEASE* don't subscribe through a forward/false domain
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