Linux on access technology

[John G Heim]

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 at reisers.ca>
> To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux."
> <speakup at linux-speakup.org>
> 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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-- 
--
John G. Heim; jheim at math.wisc.edu; sip://jheim@sip.linphone.org