Charles Bolton Personal wrote: > Don: Why did you dump the mightmite carrier and cardpc? I'm not Donald Sutherland and I don't play one on TV <grin> but I can tell you why I ditched the Card PC. 1) There are no Cell Computing products AFAIK with audio capabilities. I know the Cell folks and they are located very close to me. I have met their engineers. I encouraged them to add audio. But they are not targeting multimedia customers, instead they are targeting telcos, and their main market is is high end embedded servers. The reason they don't add audio is primarily due to lack of pins on the "card edge" or "module edge" or whatever you want to call it. The CardPC was just shy of 300 pins and the new Plug'N'Run is well over 300. They are all used for other features, and they don't seem to be interested in giving up pins for audio. I want my wearable to talk to me and also to play mp3s and send binaural beats into my brain such that the differential between left and right entrains my brain into enlightenment <VBG>. But I don't want to add a card just to do audio. Perhaps USB is a solution, but I have seen very few proven examples, the only ones I have heard are from Ralf Ackerman, who BTW seems to go after all of this stuff with as much vengeance as I do. 2) The Cell Computing parts are very pricey compared to the recent proliferation of low cost multimedia boards. At the time that I did CardPC, the carrier board plus the associated cable set cost more than the entire PCM-5822 but didn't include the CPU module! The CPU module at the time was twice the cost of the entire PCM-5822! These prices have dropped a lot but they are still very high priced compared to Advantech and others. 3) The CardPC modules run hot, and there are no heat sinks on the carrier boards. I needed a fan to avoid having the system freak out and reboot itself. The MediaGX runs hot too, and for a while I was very concerned about heat on both the PCM-5822 and IBM microdrive. But things have seem to have stabilized. I run my wearable 24/7 and I have had no problems with flaky reboots in quite a while now. 4) I had problems in resource conflicts with the MightyMite ethernet hardware and also with serial ports. I specifically chose the Mighty because it had four serial ports, but I always ended up with weird resource conflicts. The ethernet on the Mighty conflicted with more than one audio card, and could not be disabled or changed without help from Cell. I was very disappointed that these settings could not be changed in the BIOS. 5) The primary reason I ditched Cell products altogether was the quest for a single board solution which included audio. Unfortunately I am only half way there since I can only do audio playback. My wearable talks to me but doesn't listen! (sound like anyone you know?) I am also struggling with the PCMCIA vs USB issues as they relate to modems. What I am looking for is a single board solution that has both duplex audio (working on linux) and at least one PCMCIA slot for modems of all kinds (POTS, LAN, CDPD, ricochet). As far as I can tell it doesn't exist (at least not in small form factor). It seems that everything that I want for wearables doesn't exist. But OTOH chasing these goals is half the fun ... -- Doug ------------------------------------------------------------ Grow your own Wearables: http://wearables.los-gatos.net What I'd like is to have you call me and my jacket answers ------------------------------------------------------------ -- 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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