"R. Paul McCarty" wrote: > > 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 don't know why people constantly attempt to put a desktop computer on their belt in order to play MP3s. A full-blown PC (x86-based, StrongARM-based, or otherwise) is overkill for 95% of the wearable applications out there. What we really want is just a glorified PalmPilot most of the time. For a portable MP3 player that you build yourself, check this out: http://www.angelfire.com/pa2/mpx/ This guy's got the right idea. A dedicated MPEG decoder DSP, and a small chip to read off the IDE drive. That's it. Why? Because that's all you need. That, a couple AAA batteries, and a 340mb IBM Microdrive in a single CFII slot instead of 12 IDE connectors, and you've got a unit smaller than a Walkman or Discman, with over 3x the storage of the Rio SE. And then you can use the IDE-to-CompactFlash adapter that's available to download MP3s from your PC to the Microdrive at full speed. woo. Screw parallel and serial ports. Don't want to risk "bouncing" your Microdrive and breaking it? I'm sure a couple DIMM sockets could be handled just as easily. A MP3 player that looks kinda like a thin stick would be different, at least. THESE are the projects we should be contributing to. An Advantech SBC or Empeg player is great for the car, or for the stereo, but not for your belt clip. More rants to follow on practical WCs and gaming application designs. :) --Vito -- Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" toWear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.blu.org
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