Re: flash drives for mobile Linux & stuff

[Brian Lloyd <brian@lloyd.com>]

At 12:28 PM 3/18/99 +0100, you wrote:
>The MIT wearable group (start looking at http://wearable.org ) has a
>number of very compact, relatively inexpensive shock-proof DIY designs 
>based on industry standard small-footprint cards some of which even 
>come with affordable head-up display. 

Well, they don't come with anything since you have to build the system
yourself.  If you are looking for a wearable based on COTS components, see
http://www.liquidimage.com and http://www.flexipc.com/Webpages/index.html.
This seems to be what is real right now.  

I also believe that rotating media will probably work if you mount it on
your person.  The human body is a pretty good shock absorber and you are
probably going to protect yourself from discomfort which therefore protects
the rotating media.  Using flash as boot media might be a good idea tho'.

>GPS boards cost next to nothing, 
>magnetic sensors for heading info should also be possible to find 
>(in a pinch, one might whip up something using a Hall sensor, cobble 
>together a circuit for signal level adjustment and pipe it into 
>audio-in, reading the signal from /dev/dsp), and there are public 
>domain GIS solutions including map plotters with GPS input out there. 

Well, which is more important to you, magnetic heading or magnetic course
(track)?  If you are going somewhere, course is probably more useful and it
comes out of your GPS so you don't need to mess about with flux gates.

>If you can hold up an IP connection to the ground with radio modems 
>(there are some solutions up to 20 miles range), or via cellular 
>modem you can use SpeakFreely for (secure) voice connections to 
>the ground, and offer your GPS coordinate or even still video from 
>a webcam via a service so that they can be tracked by the ground station.

If you are looking for a relatively long-range data link, it is difficult
to be amateur packet radio.  Get your ham license and running a 9600 bps
half-duplex data link is also a COTS proposition.  You could even add in a
link to the Internet if you were so inclined.  Broadcasting position and
altitude could be fairly interesting to play with.

At this point I am thinking about using my hopefull-soon-to-arrive wearable
computer with head-mounted display (HMD, not a HUD) to display useful
information from my GPS, air data computer, and engine monitor.  I think
that it would be useful to always have AoA, airspeed, G loading, ground
track, engine warnings, etc., always in my field of view, even if I am
looking back over my shoulder at a target I have just passed while doing ACM.

>An even more wacko idea would be putting a corrective optics with a
>focus at infinity in front of the linear CCD of a hacked scanner and 
>use the thing to acquire high-resolution imaging of below terrain,
>streaming the result to a hard drive. The stripes can be later
>combined into contiguous imagery. One would perhaps have to mount 
>the CCD head onto a gyro-stabilized platform against the vibration, 
>though.

Jeppesen has terrain info available with sufficient detail to allow you to
add terrain info into your map or synthesized forward view.  Call up
Jeppesen and, for about $100, they will send you a sample of their full
database.  That makes it possible to write code to process their data
without having to subscribe up front.  It is certainly easier than trying
to collect the terrain info yourself.  There is already enough work to do.
No need to create more.

>It looks as if one can create something very interesting from existing
>components with relatively modest investments in hardware. I don't
>have the time nor the means to play with this stuff, but perhaps
>somebody here has.

Already doing it.  My LiquidImage M-1 and ViA-II haven't arrived yet (8
week lead time) but I am already thinking about this.  Oh yeah, and I plan
to run Linux on this thing.  

BTW, does anyone know of any reasonable speech recognition software that
runs on Linux?  I don't think that a keyboard will be too useful in the
cockpit.


Brian Lloyd                                    Lucent Technologies
brian@lloyd.com                                3461 Robin Lane, Suite 1
http://www.livingston.com                      Cameron Park, CA  95682
+1.530.676.6513 - voice                        +1.530.676.3442 - fax    O-

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