>Anyway, I've been thinking about the minimal computer needed to do what I
>needed--more of a size and battery life constraint than a price thing.
>Well, I eventually realized (I'm a little dense), that all I needed was
>networking so I could connect to my powerful workstations at home (dual
>PII/300). Well, I came up with this solution, which I call Hermes (since
>this computer basically acts a messenger between me and my other computers).
>
WinCE, pilot, libretto, PC110, there are many solutions for this kind
of behavior. Granted they may lack some of the flexibility you seek, but
as a gateway to a larger machine, I think the cost and form factor of those
above really can't be beat.
>I started designing a computer which was basically nothing. It has ports
>for a monitor, keyboard, audio I/O, and PCMCIA. It's powered by a 100MHz
>StrongARM and has a linux kernel in flash. The shell is minimal, having
>only very basic commands, such as telnet and shutdown. It should run on
>two AAA batteries.
1. Connectors are big....go USB or some such and allow more devices with
less connectors.
2. 2xAAA is a great demo. It is however a demo. Think more on the order
of one of the Sony Li 530/730 and you'd be set for a nice long day with
enough power to actually USE your choice of data connection devices.
As an example, some WinCe devices operate on 2xAA for 20 hours without a
modem. Using a PCMCIA modem, they have ~5 minutes of power. Powering
devices that drive "human scale" things like harddisks, modems, Enet,
and some displays....is prohibitive
3. Flash should be added to keep power and size down while
still keeping that full fledged OS in place (adding a 'personal database'
of experience for a remembrance agent might get large, no?)
>
>Add a cellular modem PCMCIA and you have a system that will let you
>harness the power of the damn fast computer sitting on your desktop at home.
>
>I'll have sketches and preliminary plans on my site soon (hopefully by
>this time next week), and I'll put a link to them here. I expect that it
>will be roughly twice the size of a type III PCMCIA card.
>
>So, what am I forgetting? Someone tell me this is crazy before I go too
>far and lose a lot of money trying to build it. If no one yells at me,
>I'll assume this is practical and throw my life savings into it--so
>please speak up.
Look into the DEC/Intel Eval boards for Strong ARM. Some have PCMCIA
already built in. They may not be small, but there is usually some amount of
information that can be garnered (schematics...gerbers...code...). They
will be costly by most wearable standards....but still much cheaper then
designing from scratch.
http://developer.intel.com/design/strong/sa-evaldownload.htm
I am interested in the same kind of system but am satisfied with an
x86 based system for experimentation for the next year. Just deciding
if speech recognition is a fun thing to have or can be used as a primary
mode of input makes for some fairly major design considerations.
>
>--
>Gregory Martin Pfeil Software Engineer
>mailto:
http://falcon.jmu.edu/~pfeilgm/
>
-drew
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew Davis
Alteon Networks
davis at alteon dot com
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