LCD Touch Screen "PDA"s for Kids?

John Q. Public asks: "I've seen the commercials on the usual children oriented channels this weekend, but I can find no technical data on the Mattel/Tyco Playtime/Fisher-Price Pixter, which investor and general press releases call a PDA for kids. It appears to have a 100x100 (or so) pixel 2 color touch-sensitive LCD 'with audio,' and accepts optional ROM packs for new functionality. I'd rush right out and buy one, but Amazon has the best price I've seen so far (US$40). Does anyone have any knowledge of these devices, specifically processor and 'ROM pack' details? Though I don't think I can pry the I Opener with the DOS based games away from my 3.5 year old, the Pixter might make road trips a bit more fun."

Comments

Looks like you need these sites:

[gorillasoft]

If you haven't already seen them -

http://lcdproc.omnipotent.net/
Software for your LCD screen.

http://www.matrixorbital.com/
LCD source

Crystalfontz has them in the $45 US price range.
http://www.crystalfontz.com/cgi-bin/pricing.pl?p ro duct=634

I think I had one of these when I was a kid...

[iforgotmyfirstlogon]

Mine had a larger screen and a red case. It was from the days before pen-based computing, but it had cursor controls built into the case. You shook it upside-down to reboot.

- Freed

Any I/O?

[Russ Nelson]

Does it have any I/O interfaces?

If nothing else, you could get a single output bit by latching an address bit whenever a certain location in the rom is fetched. And you could get a single input bit by giving up half the rom's address space, and attaching the input bit to the rom's most significant address bit. Duplicate the half ROM's contents, only have one subroutine in the upper half return a one instead of a zero.

Hack, hack.
-russ

When will they learn

[Rick the Red]

They will probably sell 100,000 of these to parents. If they followed the Lego Mindstorms model by publishing internal details and encouraging hacking they would probably sell another 100,000 of them. But Matell is probably afraid that if they published the specs then someone they haven't yet bought out might release something similar. As if any competitor would need published specs to copy this idea.

How long before software that does this same thing is available for the Palm OS?

Y'know what I hate about Ask Slashdot?

[Russ Nelson]

Y'know what I hate about Ask Slashdot? So very few people read it. And yet, some of the questions posed are very interesting. But the only Ask Slashdots that get any attention at all are the ones that make it to the top page.
-russ