On Tue, 25 Jun 2002, Jason Dufair wrote:

Jason,

> I've been watching Dynapad out of the corner of my eye.  Just wondering
> - what kind of hardware will this run on?  IOW, what's the cheapest
> WinCE box I might find on eBay so I can play with (maybe help with) Dynapad?

The iPAQ I use for Dynapad testing I grabbed on eBay for $170.  For that,
I got an iPAQ 3150 and a CompactFlash sleeve.  I also have a 128 MB CF
card.  The whole set-up put me back about $200. I've seen as low as $100
for just the iPAQ.

The 3100 series is the same as the the more popular 3600 series, except
that it has 16 MB (instead of 32 MB) of RAM, and a 4-bit greyscale instead
of a 16-bit color screen.  Because of the screen, battery life is 5x the
3600 series.

It looks like that is still about the going price is around $150 for a
sleeveless 3150.  Maybe able to get one cheaper if you watch the auctions
well.

If you get something from the 3100 series, a CF sleeve and card is
neccesary to run a 5 MB image decently.  Thanks to Yoshiki's snazzy WinCE
VM, it'll utilize the free space on the CF card as memory.  I imagine the
same thing can be achieved if you're running Linux with a swap file.

One day, it may not be nec. to have a CF card- as soon as I can find the
time and a serial cable, I plan on experimenting with Squeak+Linux in the
ROM, but that's not a priority.

There may be cheaper devices available as well, but you're not going to
get much cheaper than the $100-150 price range.  Make sure you've got
something at least 130 MHz and with 16 MB of RAM.  I've never tested the
WinCE VM on anything but PocketPC 2000 and 2002, so I don't know if it
works with WinCE 2.0, which is what the most capable pre-iPAQ devices ran.

Aaron