Nathan, > What are the physical dimensions and weight of the CharmIT Pro? Sorry for the delay on this. A bit of background first. We have an aluminum case design that was built for the original CharmIT. This is a PC/104 based system. The case was originally set up for two boards: a CPU board and dual PCMCIA PC/104 module. The case looks like this: http://www.charmed.com/img/products/case.jpg http://www.charmed.com/img/products/guts.jpg The actual CAD drawings for the case are here http://www.charmed.com/img/products/case.drawings.2000.12.20/ And this is the CAD viewer (warning: it's a 25MB download) http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/index/0,,837403-123112,00.html As you can see, the case is an irregular shape, so it is hard to describe dimensions. I just loaded up the AutoDesk CAD viewer and looked at the drawings to find the dimensions. I marked the dimensions on this photo: http://www.charmed.com/img/dimensions.jpg So the case is really two sections, the part that has room for 2 PC/104 boards is approx 4x5x2 inches. The other part contains the power board, it is approx 2x5x2 inches. So overall the case is approx 6x5x2 inches. I don't have a scale so I'm not certain of the weight at the moment, but it also depends on what you put inside the case. The case itself is very light. The PC/104 based CharmIT is two boards (CPU + PCMCIA) plus small power board and hard drive. The CharmIT Pro is one SBC with optional MiniPCI cards (very light). I will try to get some actual weights and get back to you on that. It is a lot lighter than lugging around a laptop for sure. Regarding the CharmIT Pro ... The CharmIT Pro is not based on PC/104 board architecture, it is an SBC with MiniPCI expansion. We are using the same case as the old CharmIT right now. Since there is only one board (HS-1600), there ends up being quite a bit of room inside the enclosure for add-ons. For example, we fit a small USB hub inside, and there is plenty of room for more equipment inside the case. We are now experimenting with some new case designs that will be more streamlined for the Pro hardware, but it will be a while till those new cases are available. Eventually the Pro version will be slimmer and smaller. For now we are using the case that is in the CAD drawings and photos above. One nice thing that we recently discovered is that there is a new MiniPCI expansion card that allows for two add on MiniPCI cards. This is nice because you can have for example either a BT878 video card or firewire in one of the slots (right on the PCI bus) and 802.11 or some other card in the other MiniPCI slot. And you still have 4 USB ports and 4 RS232 ports, and 1 parallel port for the addition of other peripherals. Eventually the new case design will fit all of this into a smaller case, since it's not the PC/104 based architecture: the SBC plus tiny MiniPCI are lot slimmer than two stacked PC/104 cards. > CharmIT Pro (800 Mhz Crusoe) is $2495.00. Is this the old > price and it is actually cheaper? Sorry, I was tired when I wrote that, the CharmIT Pro (800Mhz Crusoe) is $2495 and the CharmIT (266Mhz Pentium) is $1995. With a VGA display now down to $995, this is within the price range of laptops. As I mentioned, we are working on some new case designs so the CharmIT Pro will eventually be slimmer and smaller. We are also working on some interesting power ideas, but we need to prototype before we can talk about what they will look like, more info on that later. -- Doug -- 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* don't subscribe through a forward/expander/false domain
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