$400 and you already have a drive? Sure you can do it. It will be heavyer than a more expensive rig, but it will be a place to start. - use lead gel batteries, for $100 you can get a few and a charger. Later when you have some bucks, get better batteries and loose the weight. - use an old laptop as your base. You may have to shop around to find the right one. You probably will want an external keyboard port, external vga port, 486 or newer, etc. Make a list, get some old reviews, look around. >From there you have several choices. 1 - audio output rig - If the processor is fast enough and the laptop has a linux & soundblaster compatabile sound card you could use mbrola or festival (free software text to speech ) and emacspeak to have an audio output rig. Add visual display later. Tht will save you a lot of power and bucks. 2 - if the laptop has a nice display you could chest mount it. Doug Plat does this. You can see a picture of Doug with his "dribble tray" style rig at http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~priestdo/wearable.pics.html. For input you could do several things including cutting a keyboard in half! I have not tried this, but it seems to work if you start with the right keyboard - http://thecraftstudio.com/bcboy/keyboard.html or for about $90 you can get a BAT board, cable and manual and put it in a vidio caset case. There are pictures of that with the pictures of Doug abouve. So, can you do it? Sure. You will need to plan carfully and make trade offs, but there is no reason you cannot start out that way, many of us started with lower power rigs that did less. Let me know how it goes, Greg -- Greg Priest-DormanNO SOLICITING -- Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" to
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