On Mon, Nov 08, 1999 at 06:24:33PM +0000, R. Paul McCarty thus spake: > There has been a recent surge of adds and products for cellular phones > with web access, email access, etc. > > Let's be honest.. most wearables are built with desktop technology > scaled down to at minimum pc/104 scale.. but with such vast power > requirements for hard drives, fast processors, and displays that half > your weight is batteries. A cellular phone weighs an order of magnitude > less and doesn't need as much power. Of course this is mostly because > it doesn't have a high powered processor capable of driving a desktop > OS, or have enough memory to store anything more then a few addresses > and phone numbers. The main advantage that cell phones have is that they are industrially produced and built using the best techniques (BGA chips, multilayer boards, etc..) available, while wearable users generally have to cruft stuff together until it's useable. Given access to the same technologies, I'd say a decently powerful wearable could be scaled down to walkman (the bulky Sony Sport kind). In the mid-80's, Steve Ciarcia had a complete computer with floppy drives, power supply, video output and keyboard input built in a Fraggle Rock metal lunch can!...but that's because the board was completely homebrewed. It's unfortunately almost impossible to homebrew a computer of decent power nowadays because almost all CPU/DSP of interest have either mega-expensive SDKs and/or are built into form factors which are very difficult to use without expensive infrastructure. What is needed is a COSHER computer system of significant power and that is homebrewable. It's something I'm (very slowly) working on...an ultra-efficient and small computer system that would yield several MIPS. (The goal is a fanatically RISC Harvard architecture with 1:1 instruction:cycle ratio, then MIPS are a pure matter of attainable clock speed, something that should be made easier through a small design) If it's small and cheap enough, then multi-computer wearables would become buildable with a total MIPS/bandwidth that would be quite useable. Eric -- 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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