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Special Engineering Problems

For example, a discussion of using low wattage components e.g. laptop motherboards, IBM CPU motherboards, Transmeta CPU motherboards. Issue to be checked - is power savings due to idle mode or half speed mode or is it just using superior/cooler VLSI technology? Be nice to get somebody to write this (volunteer anyone?) who's actually built or is building one. Or get e.g. IBM or Transmeta to donate hardware so I can build one and write about it. Oooo, good idea. I'll have to look into this.

Basically, though, the things to be overcome in a portable are:

  1. Low weight
  2. Small volume
  3. Minimal power draw
  4. Minimal cooling
  5. Shock Resistance
  6. Configuration of "head node" and the network.

Probably aren't a lot of Gbps solutions out there, also.



Robert G. Brown 2003-05-12