I received one of the Timeline units yesterday, and have spent a little
time digging into it. At first glance, it does not appear to be suitable
as a wearable. The power draw of the computer is too high, the case is
somewhat larger than would be convenient to carry, and the included power
supply is as big as a brick and 24 volts. This does not appear to be a
simple hack, either, as the power connection to the backplane is through a
multiple (36 or 38, the unit's closed at the moment) pin header. The
computer itself consists of a motherboard plugged into a backplane, an
active backplane which has 3 slots (1 motherboard, one ISA 16 bit, and 1
proprietary into which the PCMCIA interface plugs.) The unit has room for
1 3.5" proprietary FDD which plugs in through a flat-conductor plastic
ribbon into the backplane and 1 2.5" HDD which plugs into the backplane
through an adapter which resembles a 2.5-3.5 adapter, but with a
proprietary connector on the side opposite the drive. I DO believe that
this thing could be hacked, since it does contain extra circuitry to run a
cash register and a printer, and some of this requires the 24 volts
supplied by the P/S. The computer itself seems to require only 12 and 5
volts.
One quick hack might be to pull 2 fuses on the bottom of the main P/S board
and see if it affects any of the circuitry. These look like they may be
more for the customer display that this thing plugs into. It will be after
the weekend before I get to test any of this, since at the moment I have no
RAM to install in the machine, and the HD I plan to use with it is
currently in the laptop I am using.
I have found the FDD that plugs into the unit at:
http://www.nimax.com/products/pricelist/epson.htm
at a cost of $83. I wil be checking further on the PCMCIA interface.
Even if it doesn't work out as a wearable, the machine is an interesting
one and could be useful for other projects as a cheap CPU.
Dale
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