On Thu, 25 Nov 2004, Tarquin Mills wrote:
> > To develop a board for a laptop is an interesting proposition. It's about > > the same as the challenge of developing a board for a PC, but with > > additional power challenges. > > The QL uses such minimal power that unless we are using Coldfire this > can be ignored. Not so. On the typical PC laptop motherboard is a charge control circuit to regulate the current to the battery, and power monitoring to select whether the battery is charged, used, or ignored. > Yes, if they were serious, while the laptop would be much faster than > 1/10th, in fact it will be faster than QPC, while if it uses Coldfire > that will bring it into the next league. Do not forget the sales on > other platforms. I would counter-propose that if we agree this is true (I think it would be hard to disagree this point) then what is really in demand is an embedded QL-compatible platform that can be a desktop or laptop board, or used for control/monitoring functions, etc. It would need to be a board of two halves, logically speaking. A standard processing, OS, memory and required interfaces half and a custom interfaces half (if that counts as half). Ironically, this is more-or-less what Nasta designed as the Aurora II. My only discomfort over Nasta's design is that he is extremely concerned about efficiency of space. Therefore, he's crammed an awful lot into a very small 6-layer PCB. I would always be inclined to spread things out a bit and go for fewer layers. But that's just me - spending a bit extra on PCB to save the cost in time to shoehorn all those tracks into SUCH a small space ;) Nasta is just too efficient for his own good ;) Dave _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
