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[rickynumber24]

I have come to the conclusion that it would be really nifty to make an arm-driven netbook. Admittedly, it'd be going more for the low-power, long battery, and minimalistic system requirements angle rather than the "cheap" angle

Comments

[twinofmunin]

i know that mjrosenb had plans along these lines last year. i'm not sure if he ever went anywhere with them or forgot about them or what, but it might be worth poking him briefly about it.

[kazriko]

Add in my Landware Gotype keyboard, and some sort of small LCD screen, and you could probably make a netbook with that Overo board that would be smaller than the stuff on the market now.

I kind of used my Palm3C as if it were a netbook at one point long past, but it had a really tiny screen compared to most netbooks.

[rickynumber24]

I have to admit that the hard part of all of this is trying to find an lcd...

Among other things, I have silly EE dreams of having it be LED-backlit because I'd think that, from DC power sources, it'd be more convenient and lower-power... but also, I just don't know where to get non-wall-outlet LCDs, especially in the 9-12 inch range. (I might want this a little big to accommodate a larger keyboard, but being cobbled together means that might not be a problem anyway...) I just don't know where to start looking.

[kazriko]

Well, maybe you could use a wall outlet powered one? Many of those come with an external power brick, so they really leave the DC hanging right there.

There's also a selection of LCDs available in Digikey, not sure if any of them are what you would want though.

[edanaher]

Not sure how helpful this will be, but here's a slightly more obscure board that might be helpful. I'm considering getting one to use as a fileserver with a USB hard drive....

http://beagleboard.org/

[rickynumber24]

Thanks! That's a nifty alternative I didn't know about because I haven't *really* done a lot of research yet.

[kazriko]

It has DVI-D output. I haven't found a display yet that uses that, so you'll probably need something else between that and the display. It looks like 800x480 5" displays are cheap ($125), but 9" displays all seem to be around $300-400 on digikey.