On Fri, 1 Oct 1999, Eric LaForest wrote: > >Has anyone attempted to integrate a netwinder into a wearable? If so, what > >were your results? Also, what good/bad points did you find? > Been there, done that... <AOL>Me Too!</AOL> > I had to give it up until I find a suitable HMD as a Compaq 286/LTE was > too clunky. I gave it up because I found using a Psion palmtop as a serial terminal too awkward. Voice output would probably work well, or you could use either the composite video or the VGA output to connect to some kind of portable monitor or HMD and a twiddler for input. > Minus: the form factor is a bit clunky. The plastic case seems too > fragile to expose to the elements, so mine is in an aluminum I don't think it's that bad really. The plastic is pretty strong, so the main thing you would have to worry about is damaging the hard drive if you drop it whilst it's running, and you have that with any wearable. I used it in a rucksack though to make it less obtrusive. > Minus: runs very hot internally (typ: 50deg C) and is *not* hardened like It does- it has a lot of PC type peripherals packed into a very small area, and not all of them can be powered down when not in use. > SO-DIMM RAM is custom...some internal specs are available, but it's (IIRC) > a 10-layer SMD board..definitely *non*-trivial to hack. I've spent months hacking it, and am still working on it- though I am getting paid for it ;) There is a daughter card which in the standard machine has the 10/100 ethernet chip, the serial port driver, and some pretty useless telephone circuitry (basically it doesn't have a SLIC to power an analogue phone, so it doesn't do any more than the seperate audio handset port does). You can put up to two PCI devices on the daughtercard, though you need some custom logic if you want both of them to do bus master DMA. We're just completing a replacement daughter card which has an ISDN interface and a proper analogue phone port with SLIC (so with relevant software, you could recieve an ISDN or Voice-over IP call, and an ordinary telephone connected to the port would ring, answer when you pick it up, etc.). After this board, we'll be designing another new card with a multi-port high speed synchronous serial interface on it (using an in-circuit-reprogrammable FPGA and probably a few meg of SDRAM- so you could potentially reprogram the FPGA to do things like image processing if that was more useful to you. We originally planned to use a DSP, but the FPGA method turned out to be cheaper, lower power, and more versatile). I'm afraid I'm not allowed to supply people with the daughtercard pinout or anything under agreement with Rebel, but you might have luck getting them from them if you ask nicely... --------------- Linux- the choice of a GNU generation. -------------- : Alex Holden (M1CJD)- Caver, Programmer, Land Rover nut, Radio Ham : -------------------- http://www.linuxhacker.org/ -------------------- -- 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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