I actually went as far as to contact a plastics molding firm about the
possibility of making a case for a Soekris motherboard. The Raspberry Pi
isn't the first tiny, low power motherboard. I happened to have
inherited one at my job from a company called Soekris. I was going to
have the plastics company make a case so that I could put in a Soekris
mobo and a standard notebook keyboard. I thought I could either use a
blutooth braille display or have the case molded such that you could
snap in some low-cost braille display. I figured the parts other than
the braille display would be about $300 per unit. But the minimum order
from the plastics company was in the thousands. I didn't really want to
start a company to compete with Freedom Scientific and Access
Technology. I'm not sure it would have been a valid business model
anyway considering the advent of smart phones.
On 05/25/2016 08:40 AM, Glenn wrote:
If the keyboard wasn't an integral part of the motherboard, I'd consider
pulling the MB and putting in my Raspberry PI.
Glenn
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kirk Reiser" <kirk@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux."
<speakup@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, May 25, 2016 8:08 AM
Subject: Re: Linux on access technology
Just as a point of interest, my wife uses her braillite-40
everyday. We replaced the batteries and charging circuit with more
modern ones about ten years ago. She really likes it and is always
worrying about what she'll do when we can't repair hers any
longer. It's editor is clunky but beats the shit out of the editor in
devices like the Alva units.
On Tue, 24 May 2016, Tom Fowle wrote:
I worked on a project to try to develop a TTY modem for the Braille Lite,
Dean was extremely tight about giving me any info about how the lite was
done. I believe they used a Hitachi HD64180 microprocessor which was a
Z80
offshoot. Pretty sure they had no more than about 2 megs of ram and
probably
64K of eprom Don't know about the clockspeed but bet it was pretty kreeky.
I don't believe it was ever field upgradable, Dean said something to me
about using Ymodem to upload programs and having nothing but trouble with
it.
Considering the instability of the hardware I think it'd be a bucket of
squashed worms.
Tom fowle
On Tue, May 24, 2016 at 08:48:08PM -0500, Glenn wrote:
Hi,
I am wondering if anyone is working on a light-weight version of Linux to
work on some of the legacy technology.
I am thinking of devices such as a Braille Light 40 and the like.
I don't know how much RAM these devices typically used, or if they can be
upgraded, the last time I had one open for some battery work, it seemed
that all the components are soldered down.
I imagine that it would take a .BIN file to prompt it to load Linux.
My thoughts are that it could give a bit more usefulness to these old
devices.
I think otherwise, it's just a clunky Braille display.
Thanks for thoughts.
Glenn
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