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Teens Make a Wearable WebCam

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the isn't-that-amusing dept.

boinger writes "Wired is reporting about some high school kid who made a wearable PC with webcam as a school project. The designed was blessed by MIT, and it brodcasts the captured images via wireless LAN which are then published to a web site. It runs Linux, too, but sadly runs Win98 as well." Imagine what this will do for those obnoxious "Worlds Funniest" TV shows that churn my stomach as I dive for the remote.

4 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. There is a max, but that's not it. by John+Campbell · · Score: 2

    It's not even the Pentium that's the problem, AFAIK, it's the chipset... most (all?) Intel Socket 7 chipsets are unable to cache more than 64M. A Pentium in, say, a VIA VP3 board shouldn't have any such problems...

    And yeah... the 286 was limited, too - something like 12M - I forget exactly, and it's not as straightforward to calculate as the [3456]86's 2^32, because of the 286's weird memory segmentation model...

  2. There is a max, but that's not it. by Joe+Mucchiello · · Score: 2

    IIRC, the internal L1 or external L2 cache design (I forget which) could only handle 64M on the P1. Installing more ram would slow the chip down because it could no longer use the cache.

    I might be wrong. But your supposition that the CPU cannot limit the amount of RAM is wrong. 8088s and 8086s can only address 1M of RAM. That's it, nothing more.

  3. Pentium??? by myconid · · Score: 2

    I'll tell you what would be innovative- use something other than x86. Why do we insist on this dinosaur?

    Well for one thing, its rather inexpensive, it has a LOT of software for it, hardware for it, and makes the software side of the device easier by not forcing them to code anything themselves.
    Stan "Myconid" Brinkerhoff

    --

    SB.
  4. Answering Questions by msassak · · Score: 3

    Ok, so I am the kid mentioned in the Wired Article.

    Now about those questions.

    Cost; approximately $5800. Yeah, i know, it's steep, and a wearable can be made for much less. But what can i say? Wireless LAN equipment is
    !?#@*ing expensive.

    The amount of RAM was a misquote. It really has 128MB. Yes, windows can only cache the first 64MB, but Linux works beautifully with all the supported hardware.

    This leads me to the OS choice(s).

    It was with a heavy heart, (and not a small number of expletives) that we decided to run Linux and Win98. The original plan was Linux only, but when confronted with what we wanted to do, and the hardware needed to do it, we were forced to run 98 also. Linux just did not have the drivers necessary for all our hardware. Yet.
    But you should all be please to know that bit by bit, as Linux support grows, we will completely phase microsoft out of the picture altogether.

    Finally, please, if any of you HAVE run a web cam off a linux box, please, do email. Any other questions, comments, suggestions, whatever, just send 'em my way.

    Mike Sassak