WLAN card to generate pulsed RF?

Hello Jasen,

Yes, that's the other option we had discussed here in the thread. However, that would usually require a hole in the device for the microphone. Not really a good option for outdoor stuff. Maybe thinning the enclosure over the mike would be enough though.

Hello Jasen,

Would be really nice but I guess it falls in the "too good to be true" or "there is no free lunch" category. Arlet had hinted that messing with the protocol may be frowned upon by the FCC and that the manufacturers don't let others in on the firmware :-(

Hello Jasen,

The laptops I had seen with LCD for machine status messaging usually didn't have that little screen backlit.

I use it for "books on tape" when I travel... the only time I have to "read" ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Maybe , maybe not :-) Even my mother in her sixties has one (ipod shuffle).

They are great for going over lectures , or listening to language "tapes". Plus pod casts of your favourite radio show or similar.

Nothing better than sitting back outside on the ferry every morning on the way to work with a good cappuccino and watching the harbour(Sydney) glide past while listening to good music.

Alex

micro sd or mmc card to expensive ?

What about wireless usb ? Probably currently to expensive and nothing available (easily) but will get cheaper and more available. Supposedly in some of the current pc chipsets but not enabled.

Alex

Hello Alex,

Yes, way too expensive here. Plus too much chance for contact failure, ESD, contamination, water intrusion etc.

Anything that sticks out from a laptop will eventually break in the field. Unsually in the least convenient place (several miles up a dirt road in pouring rain...). Or the USB stick fell out of the tool box but who knows where.

Hello Alex,

Even our president (US) has one, IIRC one of his daughters gave it to him. Don't know about his father though.

My way to work is a hallway, takes about five seconds :-)

Except when going to clients but then I have a nice radio and CD player in the car. At airports all the din is too loud anyway.

Hi Joerg,

why not take a leaf out of teenagers book of phone tricks, and use 20kHz audio...

Cheers Terry

"bizarre pathologies" - thats a lovely turn of phrase Joerg! They also tend to occur more during power-up and power-down, so thats proobably asking for trouble.

Can you make a crude accelerometer out of a piezo speaker, and do the audio sans hole?

Cheers Terry

OK, but how many people in a given shop are likely to use it? And for the next few years is running a second PC, 32 bit Windows (there will be a 32 bit version of Vista), or one of the VMs a really unacceptable solution?

I certainly sympathize, I have some DOS and Win16 stuff I have to support too.

But, this is not unlike the complaint about the lack of legacy ports on new PCs and laptops. The fraction of users this will impact is very, very small. And in both cases, there are workarounds available.

No not an adaptor for wireless but wireless usb (uwb) supposed to be already in some of Intels new chipsets. Supports up to 480Mbps up to a few metres away.

Alex

Hello Terry,

Ask our shepherd-mix for her opinion about 20kHz ;-)

Whenever I do high-frequency audio stuff or PWM in the lab and a ferrite core gets a bit loose she dashes off to the other end of the building. The rottie-mix keeps snoring away under a table.

Hello Terry,

Yes. However, when winds and other noises come up the SNR quickly goes to pots.

Hello Robert,

If a VM is able to run legacy DOS, fine. Otherwise no, since I am not inclined to schlepp around two laptops ;-)

Nearly all (in my case all) programmer pods and the like have become available as USB versions. But in the world of specialized design software that isn't happening for works that originated at universities and other research facilities. For much of that there is nobody around anymore that would be able to change it. Often there isn't even anyone who would know where the source code files are.

Hello Alex,

But I am afraid it will be some time until laptops have that built in. Also, most agencies or businesses won't allow their staff to order new ones as long as the "old" ones haven't reached the end of the depreciation tables. Something like three years, usually.

Also, I'd need more than a few meters. More like 30 or so, and it has to go from inside a vehicle to a pole. In rain, sleet, hail, loads of thawed and re-frozen snow, the works.

LOL :)

can you use a bidirectional solenoid as the transmitter, and do the "audio" at 5Hz?

Cheers Terry

Hello Terry,

Probably. But that would require some patience on the part of the folks that have to do the firmware updates in the field. And who knows, maybe that would bother the whales in the oceans :-)

Sounds like NFC. That will give you at least 100 kb/s

Wim