I was sitting at home reading my latest copy of Mouser (component catalog)
and I came across LCD GUI touch screen kits and Zilog Z80 kits with USB,
Serial and 100Mbit Ethernet. My head being screwed up from pain killers (on
worker's comp from slipping on ice at a client's), tried to put 2+5
together to get 4 and gave me an expensive (maybe not) idea. Palms and
Visors and the like are really small and great for many tasks, but what if
I could take a similar processor, say a Dragonball, an ARM or the even an
older one (maybe even a mobile RISC-based CPU - now that would be cool) and
link them into a slightly larger and more useful hand-held that has USB,
Serial and Ethernet with AD and DC capabilities and toss it into a steel
box with rubber seals and rubber/knurled steel outsides and a thin plastic
piece covering the display with a metal lock-back cover. I know there are
knock-off covers out there for the Visor and the Palm that are sold
separately, but the palm doesn't have built in USB or Ethernet or Serial,
you are stuck with a bulky add-on or a cradle. What If someone could get
around that? Anyone have some thoughts to it?
Next leap into less than sanity...
I actually considered sitting down and getting a prototype board from
another mail order company the other day to build my own AT P200MMX
motherboard with PC100/133 SD-RAM support, AGPx and ISA/PCI. Now here's
where the idea for this would require the prototype board: built in USB and
Ethernet and possibly SCSI on a standard AT board in as small a size as
possible while enabling use of as many slots in the back of an AT case for
the AGPx, PCI and ISA. I was thinking of using something like an AMD-based
Ethernet chip with the prototype board's VIA motherboard chipset. Anyone
have comments?
Kind of lame or just expensive and nuts?
-John Boffemmyer IV
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Founder, Lead Writer, Tech Analyst
and Web Designer Boff-Net Technologies
http://boff-net.dhs.org/index.html
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Received on Thu Feb 06 2003 - 20:07:00 GMT