I haven't done too much on the project since October of last year (the holiday season was pretty distracting), though I've put a little work into the power supply for the LCD. A friend, however, gave me a better name for the project than I am currently using: DayTripper, becuase the device is meant to be able to run for a full day (at least a full work-day) on a single battery charge.

At least I won't have to think too hard about what the product's theme music should be.

Success! I got the kernel to compile: all it took was a the right configuration options and a bit of manual fiddling (I needed to recompile mm/filemap.o to fix a mess of undefined references). After you've applied the Sharp patches for the LH79520 and LH7A400, you should be be good to go. If you run into probelms, however, the best advice I can offer is: 1) only select the configuration options you absolutely must have and 2) use the FastFPE rather than NWFPE (NWFPE didn't seem to comp

Not much new to report: I've been pretty busy with other things for the past few weekends, so I haven't had lots of time to devote to the project. I did get a Linux kernel that is supposed to work with the Cogent board (directly from Sharp), or, at least, with the MCU on the board (I can dummy up a driver for anything that doesn't already have something in the kernel tree). I've tried to compile the kernel a couple of times so far, with no real s

Well, I figured out what was wrong with minicom: the default configuration referred to various upload/download utilities that didn't exist in the locations the configuration referenced. Some of them (sx/rx) didn't exist at all, others (ascii-xfr) were just in other places (/usr/local/bin instead of /usr/bin). So, off I went in search of the XModem/YModem/ZModem transfer commands (which don't appear to be in my Linux installation).

We got clobbered by hurricane Irene (if you heard on the news that there were 6000 people still wihtout power a week after the hurricane, we were two of those people.) so I haven't touched the project for about a week. When I was able to get back to it, I had to regain my bearings.

I've gotten a lot of really good advice from friends, both about the project and about the prospective business concerns surrounding it. Here is an ad-hoc redux:

I've got the LCD and SBC that I ordered. There was a slight delay on the SBC, due to a miscommunication between the reseller, Microcross, and Cogent, but the reseller was very nice, once I infromed them of the problem, and overnighted the package to me at no extra charge.

• The LCD that I was interested in is outside my price range, so I'll have to rethink that. This is a potential deal breaker, but, fortunately, it is also off the table for the moment, because:
• I looked at a number of COTS boards, but they all cost too much to fit in my target price, so I decided that I had to design the board myself. I have found a number of

Ok, it's been a few weeks since my last entry, and I've been a busy boy: First, I've done a fair amount more research, read a bunch of data-sheets and technical notes, and scoped out a few suppliers. The hackers handheld is looking more and more do-able, the only remaining questions are price and demand (which are, to a large degree, linked quantities).

Here are the results of my research so far:

On my recent trip to Viet Nam I tried to use a PDA (Palm 135) as a portable computing environment, with only limited success:

I don't quite remember how I found this site, (probably linked to from a /. article, but it's already rolled off the end of short term memory and into oblivion) but I really like it: The War Against Silence. Maybe it's just 'cause this guy has a 'tude, or maybe it's because he likes OS X (with a 'tude, no less). Whatever the reason, after reading only half of one article, I'm hooked.

Originally posted January 14, 2003:

We arrived on Saturday in Hanoi and took a 2 day tour of Halong Bay. Eventhough we had thought we had enough time in Vietnam, we found the trip was far too short. Jeffrey decided to cancel our trip to Ankor Wat so we could stay in Vietnam.

More on Hue

This log was originally posted on January 10, 2003.
Pollution, Plumbing and Heating