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Re: EPIA 5000 psuedo-wearable

From: Bryan Hurley <>
Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2003 13:04:39 -0500 (EST)

The power supply you link to is very similiar to the one in the Cubid
cases. No one has been able to get much information whether it can take
anything other than exactly 12v, but the link you give says that it takes
ONLY ONLY ONLY 12volts.

This is a problem:
Car voltage is 12v only sometimes, usually it is 13.8v, when you start the
car it can go to 6v, and when you are running without any accessories you
can go as high as 14v or so.. and there are spikes of course..

So you could get a Zener diode and just burn off the excess voltage in the
car as heat, but the system would reboot when you start the car and the
voltage goes below 6v.. unless you get a car audio capacitor to
compensate.. which may or may not work in this situation..

running off of batteries, you need a good regulator.. usually regulators
take input that is a couple volts higher than output.. so you would need
14v or higher input to regulate to 12v...

building one is not very fun as you need lots of voltages instead of just
5v on an embedded board..

if you want to go the route you have now, maybe use the following which
will work in a car or batteries.. I just am not positive about its
efficiency..

http://home.attbi.com/~zootjeff/

otherwise you have reasonable plan.. embedded boards may give more power
but everything has advantages and disadvantes, if this is what you know
and can get and afford then sounds good.

Bryan

On Fri, 14 Feb 2003, ben wrote:

> I've found the EPIA 5000 motherboard, with 533Mhz Eden CPU to be suitable (
> http://www.viavpsd.com/product/epia_mini_itx_spec.jsp?motherboardId=2 ).
> It's quite small, and has great power consumption for an x86 system.  There's
> also some great PSUs available, at reasonable prices (like this one
> http://store.ituner.com/ituner/miniitxpower.html ), that I can use to power
> the system from an AC adapter, a battery, or an automobile cigarette lighter.
>  For the battery, I'll be using 2 sets of 10 series wired NiMH "C" cells
> (1.2v, 4000mAh), in a parallel circuit, for a total output of 12v & 8Ah.
> Given the 14W consumption that's been mentioned on this list, I should be
> able to power the unit for almost 7 hours.  Obviously, it will be a lot less
> if I'm actually doing anything with it, as various perpherals and drives will
> be consuming significant amounts of power, but I feel confident that this
> will give me enough power to do things like listening to & composing email
> through headphones & twiddler with emacspeak, for a few hours, or so.
>
> I should be able to add a laptop hard drive, slimline CD or DVD drive, and
> IDE CF drive.  I'll probably attempt to use only the CF drive, when running
> off of battery power.
>
> Any thoughts or advice?  The only challenging part of this projects, that I
> can see, are getting the battery power right, and heat (I'll probably need to
> put at least one fan in, although I'd like to avoid it, if at all possible).
>
> -ben

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