On Mon, 5 Oct 1998, James R. Hall wrote: > apologies if this post is off topic, > I'm building (really in the design phase right now :P) a computer > to go inside my car for various reasons... I'm kind of working on this, too, as the wearable has been put on temporary hold due to funding shortages... > among them; mp3's (rips of of my somewhat massive collection), gps > (if my car ever gets stolen, I could just hook my desktop up to a > hf ham-radio (via packet radio) and see where it is), midis, starting > my car on cold winter days (via a wireless network adapter, tcp/ip, and > win-vnc :P) (possibly, I dunno how well a computer would handle the cold!) Ah, yes, MP3s... Would an overclocked 486dx2/50 (I think it's somewhere around 75MHz) be fast enough to decompress MP3s? I'm figuring that if I leave the thing on all the time, it will keep itself from freezing. A thermistor & fan routed through the spare tire compartment to the outside will hopefully keep it cool enough in the summer. I'm powering the thing off of my old 120vac inverter (or will be, anyway)... The problem I'm trying to cope with at the moment is not running the battery down. Perhaps a couple of extra car batteries could be placed in the trunk, though, but hydrogen(sp?) gas could become a problem (my trunk is open to the rest of the car(1988 Plymouth Sundance))... Any ideas? Also, I have an old Compaq LTE/286 laptop that I was originally planning on using as a wearable (got as far as a display). I've got a little program in the works (M$ QBasic 4.2 :) to write stuff to the 2nd video page, then write it backwards to the 1st video page, making a mirror image (needed for backwards text)... I'm hoping to mount the LCD to the dash so the image reflects off of the inside of the windshield and interface it to the insturmentation (assuming I get around to it). > Despite the various good things about linux (besides its > 'user-friendly-ness' :P) > I intend on using windows95 for this job. (why? because how easy it is to > configure > various software on it, linux confuses me :/) I already have most of the > programs > to do what I want to do but I was wondering if there was a cheap voice > recognition > (for commands mostly) program/voice synthesis program that will work while > there is something > playing over the soundcard? (midis or mp3's...) I'm planning on using festival and maybe ears, assuming that this junker-486 can handle it. My linux solution to the dsp lock problem (assuming you have a fast enough processor), would be to create a couple of fifos and have each app write to them as if they were dsps. Then fix up a little app using the midas digital audio system that reads the two streams from the fifos, mixes them in software, and sends it to the soundcard. (Or some variation of this. I've never tried it...) Midas sends my CPU load through the roof (1.4) when playing a single .MOD at 44KHz, so you'd have to have a pretty hefty CPU (I've an AMD K5-PR166 as my desktop machine). I don't know if you can do this from Windows or not, but there is a Win32 version of midas. > hopefully some of this could carry over into someones wearable conversation > so it isn't > totally off-topic! > (btw, is quick/visualbasic good to interface to parallel, serial port hw?) QBasic won't run the serial ports faster than 9600bps. It's fairly simple to write a thing in QBasic using INPORT and OUTPORT (I think that's it, it's been a very long time) to control relays via the parallel port (using ANDgates to decode a number on the port, using that to cycle a flipflop wired as a freq. divider, driving a transistor with Q which turns a relay on (but be sure to put an antispiking diode across the relay coil)). It won't work right under 95, though, as 95 seems to grab everything that DOS apps write to 0x3f8 (or whatever) and route them through 95's printer driver. I have no experience with VB. I think this is very on-topic for a wearables conversation, as my main goal in the car-CPU project is to have it acting as a high-power digipeater (or freq-gateway, perhaps) for my wearable. This, I think, the 486 would be more than sufficient for. -- Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" toWear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.ml.org
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