Re: Could a pin be run by a pc?

On Tue, 29 Nov, dan.littlejohn@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> You could even go so far as to not require a hard drive and embed all
> the software in the bios. There are dozens of signal interface cards,
> even with high current. You could get this down to something with
> everything replaceable from a large pool of parts (including the custom
> bios as you would just need the bios image and some standard
> motherboard like PCI 2.1 compliant). Really cheap and flexable.

You're close, but I don't think you'd want all the software in "BIOS."
What you'd really want is to just use some sort of FLASH memory for all the
software. You can currently do this with Linux...I built a PC that had
nothing more than a motherboard and a CompactFlash adapter that once I got
it loaded and configured had a full featured web server that would stream
the audio from the microphone port in realtime through the web. I didn't
use a fanless motherboard, but if I had there would have been no moving
parts. The FLASH was mounted read-only, too, so there was no reason to
worry about the FLASH dying due to over-write (anywhere from one to a few
hundred thousand writes in the same location of FLASH will destroy it...not
a problem for your average digital camera user, but a big problem for a
root filesystem).

You can do the same thing for a lot of other applications already. The
IPCop firewall software (www.ipcop.org) is really just a custom web
application that runs on top of a Linux kernel. You can install it to a
CompactFlash card, too.

You still need an I/O interface board. Something like what P2K used would
be good, though you'd want to re-do it since there are only so many of
those boards around. It's a pretty simple thing to do, though. You could
get a design done and just post the schematics and PCB layout to the 'net
and people could easily make their own (or have them made). You could also
pretty easily build an interface board to a standard WPC driver board, I'd
think. It would have to have switch matrix stuff on it since that isn't on
a WPC board, but that would be simpler and would make use of existing
boards. Since the PinLED guys have made a replacement driver board,
there's no worry about the supply of those running out (though you are now
locked into the PinLED board, which some don't like...but they can just
part out a junk WPC game :).

The sound and "video" can all be done with existing PC hardware.
Personally, I'd like to see someone tackle this. I've posted about doing a
scenario like this before, but everyone seems to have their own way of
wanting to skin this cat, and few of those methods jive with mine. :-)

I'm too busy learning machining to work on this right now, but my ultimate
goal is still to one day make my own machine, and something like the above
is how I'd tackle it.


--Donnie

--
Donnie Barnes http://www.donniebarnes.com 879. V.
.

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