Arnould Nazarian wrote:
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Arnould (and Tony),
I know you have always been looking for ways to have a QL device live in the commercial world. Maybe there is a small opportunity here.
At the company I work for, we do a lot of automation. This means that some things need to be registered at different places/times during the production cycle (in this case in the food industry). We currently use either a PC for this (very big, allows way too much for what we need it for and it is not that cheap (sceens are a pain). In other cases we use a Bizerba ITU, which is a weighing terminal which can be controlled serially (very nice, but also very expensive).
In the ideal case, we just need a simple remote screen (black and white will do, we need to be able to display one line of buttons, two lines of small text and one line of big text (or buttons and five lines of small text). If we can display more, that is better, but this is a minimum. We also need to have a remove keyboard.
What could be done is build a small device which has a screen and keyboard and which can be controlled remotely either through the network (UDP) or using a serial connection.
I have looked in the market for his kind of device and could only find something with a 2x40 display. I believe there is a market for this if the price is wright (less than 500euro).
Maybe this is something Tony and/or Nasta can build? We could base this on a very simple QL and do the programming in SBasic. There is already a screen and keyboard connection, so that would be possible. It would onnly need a limited amount of memory (I think 128kB usable would be enough). A simple flash card could be used as persistent device (also allows distributing and cpoying software).
In fact, this would be something which is way too powerful the use I have for it, but I am sure others would do more interesting things as well.
What do you think? Joachim
