I think this is complete unrealistic. You have a complete wearable pentium class computer here (minus the HMD). It would be expensive (easilly over $1k), it would be big (a pc/104 board with pcmcia is already the size of a walkman before you add batteries), and it would be power hungry. I've seen press releases from (trying to track down) a couple of vendors who are building devices the size of the rio incorporating IBM's microdrives (~100-300MB drives) into these cigarette pack sized devices with battery lifes around 8-12 hours for 1AA battery. And for less then $500. Of course transfers are still slow over a parallel port connection, but if you can cram several albums on these it may not be such a bother. BTW, I have the Diamond RIO and I use it every day. Usually transfer bunch of songs once a week and listen to them in chaotic order. Cheers. -Paul Legacy Xunker wrote: > > I know this has probably been discussed ad nausea already, but I'd like > to revisit it a little bit. > > The problem will current portable MP3 players are storage. 1 hour of > music at 112kps doesn't cut it for me. That's why the idea of a build > yourself MP3 box seems so seductive. > > So here is my basic idea: We need something with enough horsepower (at > least a p60 speed should do), sound (16 bit, nothing special, maybe > SRS), large storage and decent battery life (at least 4 hours). > > The engine I would envision is something really close to the Cell > Computing dx-100 card which is faster than a p75 at decent power usage. > I don't know if it has sound built in, but I hope so. A pc/104 sled > wouldn't really be necessary, as for the minimal IO that need to be done > you could make one substantially smaller- We'd need power in, sound out, > Serial IDE and (preferably) an interface for PCMCIA. Video wouldn't be > needed, as you really wouldn't use a HMD for this; a serial display > module would do. The other serial port would be for sound and > navigation, something like the remotes for portable Minidisk players. > Power would be one of the largest things size wise, but I NiMH battery > like I have for my PowerBook, 45wh at 5 inches by 2.5 inches by .75 > inches, and would give four hours and change, depending on > configuration. > > Configuration, you cry? Yes-- this is where the PCMCIA slots come in. > One slot would be a Flash card, about 10-20 meg would be great, to hold > the OS (linux custom) and playlists. The other would be for the user. > Instead of a fixed IDE hard drive (although it would be nice), but > modular storage via PC Card peripherals. These would include Flash and > SRam Cards, CD-ROM drives, SuperDisk and Zip drives and even SCSI > devices. Using some code that would automagically detect these and play > from them, you could choose your media verses paying 60 bucks for a 32 > meg SmartMedia Card. Most of the drive are small enough (like the > PCMCIA zip drives) to be strung on a belt or bandolier (sp). Vibration > and shock would be a problem, but to help this, each MP3 could be copied > to the boot device, which is solid state, and spin down any rotational > media you use until the next file. Seek times would suffer on intro > play mode, but if the method is just "look through play list (on boot > device) on LCD, load song, spin down drive" it wouldn't be too bad, and > save battery power. And for pure linear play, depending on boot device > size, you could copy 2 or three songs to Flash ram and keep them in > queue. And going even further, you could have an accelerometer rigged > up to detect them there was no movement or vibration and load files > then. > > Comments? I know this is really OT, but it uses the same hardware as > wearables so... > > -- > Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of > "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" to> Wear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.blu.org -- R. Paul McCarty / DARS Coordinator /
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