Sunday, January 6, 2008

Repairative Surgery

Things of mine to see:

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\\Laptop went into hibernation again and got worked on again. It was in pieces for a few days on a table, and today my dad took me to his employer's workshop and borrowed the equipment to fix it, which only included the use of a little rubbing alcohol, some solder, and a good soldering iron. We were there for some two hours, I think, because I kept asking what something was and there was always a big long explanation for it... ugh.

But \\Laptop is running again, thankfully.

I have had this idea in the back of my brain for a while now, and I wanted to see what other people think of it now.

A while ago, I saw a video of someone trying to burn an ISO image of a Linux distribution to a lightscribe CD-R. The burn failed. So they had a "Linux Coaster." With a picture on it. Then I thought, hey, what if I made a real linux coaster? A coaster that runs linux! But what does it do? Shows pictures! What a great idea!

Now, remember that I don't know much at all about actually making electronic devices. I understand the large components I would need (storage medium, processor, display, power source), but I don't know which of these things in specific I would need, and I don't know how to actually link them all together. The display part is easy enough, because the it supports a parallel interface, so I can find a processor with a parallel interface going out, I'm in business. Then, I was thinking SD card for storage. There's two issues there: I don't know the protocol for SD card, and the second, it's formatted in FAT and I don't know how to manipulate FAT with a microcontroller. And there's yet another problem: I don't know how the JPEG format is composed, so I couldn't send data to the display...

Ugh. I should start with something simpler.... But I want the microcontroller experience, and that's the only way I know how to get it.

Anyways, I need to get to bed. It's starting to get early.

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