[Wylug-discuss] cheap / old laptop? & Linux Music system

[James Holden]

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Richard Allan Waite wrote:
| --
| hiya all
| does any one know of a place where i can buy or get hold of a cheap
| laptop?
| specs don't matter as it will only be used for command line stuff
|
| also ive been thinking about creating a linux based music player
| my plan is to build a box to place in back of a car holding a digital
| copy of all my cd's
| but im finding it hard to work out the method of controling the track
| and play and pause

I've toyed with the idea before. It's a back burner thing for me at the
moment. My current car has a nicely sized compartment in the boot for a
CD changer which I'm certain I could use.

I thought about building my own head unit with an LCD display like
Maplin's N30AZ, which is a 4x20 character backlit module. I'd have some
buttons for input too. RS do some graphical display modules too. The one
at 240x128 pixels would do nicely because it's the right shape for the
rectangular facia.

I considered using an old Psion3 because they have a nice wide display,
a backlight and a standard RS232 serial port. You could even write the
software for it in OPL so no nasty embedded stuff to get involved with.
They use very little current too, so you could leave it connected to the
battery all the time and have it remotely switch the laptop on, which
could then rapidly boot a minimal distro and begin communicating with
the head unit.

Just some random thoughts.


James


- --
James Andrew Holden, Leeds, UK    (james at jamesholden dot net)
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