Status: This is a project in planning state. Currently, these are just thoughts and ideas noted for future usage -- once I have time and/or materials needed for this. If you want to help me with the materials issues, you can check the WishList for an overview what I am missing. Usually, though, the missing resource is just time.
Thoughts
I want to design and build a wearable computer. A wearable computer in my opinion is an unintrusive computing device that I can have with me all the time (well, nearly all the time at least). It shall be highly customized to fit exactly my computing needs, and might be easily to customize to fit other people's needs as well. I want to use it to communicate with others in realtime or in a store-and-forward way (which means maybe either phone or email), navigate (GPRS, some mapping software either with local data storage or through a network connection), play (whatever -- MUDs, single-user games like chess, even a card game with a second wearable nearby), gather data (microphone, camera for photo and video, maybe other inputs, maybe even monitoring of pulse, blood pressure, other biometric data).
I want it to have a comfortable text input device, a mouse-like pointing device, a display that's easy to use (either head-mounted or otherwise comfortable, too), a long-lasting power supply (say, five hours of continuous operation without having to reload the batteries), and it must be kind of light-weight so that I can wear it without causing permanent structural damage to myself.
Notes
- GPS for navigational purposes
- GSM+GPRS or Bluetooth? Either replace a mobile phone, or connect to it and use it... I want Bluetooth anyways, need an SMS feature then, though.
- WLAN
- Audio input/output - if using cellphone, make the computer be the headset...
- 3.5-inch embedded computer, maybe even smaller?
Soekris 4801-50 is a nice thing, 182 EUR currently.
Epia board, seem even cheaper, and quite powerful.
- VIA EPIA-PD6000E - $183, Mini-ITX, needs ATX power
- VIA EPIA-VEPD-5000 - $99, Mini-ITX, needs ATX power
- VIA EPIA-N - $390, Nano-ITX, strange power connector
Toradex makes really small computers (SO-DIMM sized) at a reasonable price.
See also http://www.ipc2u.de/
- Power from some lithium-ion cell?
Preferably FreeBSD with some standard applications for mail, web, news, notes, audio, calendar (or have it webbased?), telephony
- Storage either on small notebook harddisk or flash memory
- USB port for extensions, whatever they might be (eg. camera, more storage)
- Crypto filesystem for just about everything (besides the OS maybe)
A Twiddler2 keyboard, I suppose
- Head-mounted display, preferably one that is not too ugly -- e.g.:
SV6 from MicroOptical - 640x480 resolution, small, light. Quite expensive.
i-glasses PC/SVGA - they are uglier, but somewhat cheaper.
Random URLs
http://www.redwoodhouse.com/wearable/ (general discussion)
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