Hitachi SH series uControllers are pretty nice. These are the little beasties that 5/6 WinCE machines are powered by. You can get a 'demo' board for < $200 last I heard. It comes 1-4 MB of SDRAM (I think). The controller already has most of the 'core logic' integrated. The Demo board comes with a CDROM with the GNU tool chain already to go. The SH3 has an MMU and there was rumor of a company porting linux to it....but that may have died. The SH3 + 16 MB SDRAM runs at about 1 watt so you should be able to drop 1 entire battery from your system and still get the same life as an x86 based machine. There are DRAM and PCMCIA capabilities on the chip, but the demo board is not routed or stuffed with the required connectors. Although it does come with full paper schematics. Unfortunately, attaching your IDE/SCSI device isn't very likely without lots of time,patience,and knowledge. If you can get away with < 4 MB of SDRAM and maybe plop 16 MB of flash, you could probably get a < $500 main box without rotating...and power hungry, drives. I am a bit of a size and power bigot myself. I'd rather take have the performance and trade it for the removal of a battery and 1/2 the stack size. OF course, currently I've got a cardPC and IDE HD wearable with no 'plugin' expandability...but thats ok, because I'm willing to wear this 1"x4"x4" box. I can;t honestly say the same for a 5"x5"x5" box stuck into a day pack (not including batteries.). -andrew davis (previous Hitachi employee who designed and developed > 5 systems based on SH uC in less then a year. Good tight little controller. Of course, I used to work with ARMs as well..another good uC...but development boards are more like $1.5k.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Andrew Davis Alteon Networks davis at alteon dot com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Andrew Davis Alteon Networks davis at alteon dot com
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