Ok, I was thinking of starting a small project on a laptop/desktop mybrid computer for university and was wondering about a few things. First off, is it possible to hook up a battery to power a small (probably 200W) power supply for a few hours? I don't know how they do it for laptops, but I'd be sticking all of that in a good old Eddie Bauer knapsack. So size isn't really THAT much of an issue, but I don't want to carry around 40lbs of batteries on my back. Second thing, does anyone know where I can find some headband displays, like the old R-Zone, but with colour. Otherwise I'll have to wait a while for colour FOLEDs to become available. Once I find out about all of these parts, I'll show everyone my master .plan and a few concept drawings.
Well, you can hook up a laptop battery for sure, but not at 200W. Laptops are designed to run at lower power ratings. I think they're generally <100W, and probably quite a bit less too. Could always hook up a few together?
You could use 100 NIMH AA Batteries, 10 series sets of 10 in parallel, and power an invertor... That would give you 12V at around 20AH, with a VERY GOOD invertor, that could give you 120V at 2A for about an hour and a half... and weigh onlly about 60lbs...at a cost of $650US... Ok.. Maybe not.
LOL. A full charge on most Ni-MH AA batteries is what, 16 hours yeah? So if you had a charger that could do 4 at once as most could, that would only take 400 hours of charging So that's around 16 days, by which time the first ones would be losing their charge because of the self-discharge of Ni-MH's. Maybe a block of car batteries and a wheelbarrow would be a good investment
Ok, so if I got maybe 2 or 3 laptop batteries, hooked up in parallel, they could power my computer (which would probably be a via epia M or a duron 800) and my head-mounted display right? As the monitor is very small, and the power usage would be very little (except for the HD and CD). But I've been trying to find a head mounted display that I saw a while on TV. It's a pair of glasses that has a small LCD projector that projects a small image onto the back of the glasses that would make it seem as though you were watching a 52" TV from 7 feet away. I need to still be able to see through at least part of the display so that I can still participate in lectures, etc... Anyone know a product that is like the one I'm talking about (that won't cost me several thousand dollars)?
I know you can get ones for 3D gaming which are relatively cheap, and I've seen ones which look like normal glasses and the screen's in the middle and is semi-transparent, but that was a concept model a few years back.
You wouldn't happen to know any links to some of those relatively cheap ones would you? Because 3d ones would be great for use with 3ds max, not to mention that if games supported it, then it would look quite cool while gaming. /me dodges an incoming missile with my head.
Well, they're only 3D in games, as that's what they're designed for, so unless you ran 3DS Max in full-screen D3D or OpenGL it wouldn't work. Plus, you can see through those displays at all.
Darn.... nevertheless they'd be really cool. Although I'd still like any URLs that would possibly be any cheap kind of HMD. Although if they're see-thru they don't have to be THAT cheap.
http://www.microopticalcorp.com/ http://wearables.blu.org/showcase/ Just a couple of links I googled. Micro Optical Corp seems to be a big player, as I found them mentioned in alot of articles. Me wants...I can imagine having this hooked up to a pair of sunglasses, playing games and such when at remote locations.
ive been looking for some small lcds to make into a hmd for ages was gonna combine it with shutter glasses to make true 3d glasses (with buffer etc) sort of hard to explain but basically using the shutter glass system to select which screen the next frame goes to with a screen (&lense system) in front of each eye . . . samsung used to do some good ones but that was 3 years ago and i couldnt get them cos they wouldnt sell direct ive been thinking bout trying the ones you get on camcorders with the lense etc built in but i cant afford it now and no one seems to have busted vid cams oh well with reguards to power if u use a solid state device as a hdd it wont take nearly as much power as a normal hdd i was told by a m8 (so this could be dubious) that the cpu on the epia only used 5 watts or something rediculously small so with solid state hdd the battery would last for ages if u only had small tft screens
In regards to the Epia thing, it's not quite 5 watts, but it's very low. A whole system including a hard drive, cd-rom drive, a pci card and a fan or two can run off a 55watt PSU.
Ack! They're all more than $1000 (at least the ones with 640x480 are)! There's that oem kit for one at TekHead.ca but that's only 320x240, mind you that wouldn't be horrible, but I couldn't really type all that well on it, not to mention that it's just the pieces. Oh well, there goes that idea... maybe I can just attach a 12 or 14" LCD display...
