Tony Hill said:
Umm..
www.newegg.com lists the Asus WL-500 for $70 and the
cheapest external USB drive they have lists for $92. I don't know
how much a mini-PCI video card sells for, but even before adding
that in you're already pushing up close to the $185 (no monitor,
or $250 with monitor) that AMD plans to sell these things for.
You're certainly not going to be anywhere close to half the price,
even if you find the above parts at a discount.
ok, lets test my theory
http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=10371044&loc=
61$
You can sell minipci B card, lets say 20$ will make it disapeare in a
matter of a minutes from Ebay.
-20$
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=20-160-502
&depa=0
23$
No need for moving parts, and 256MB is plenty of space + cooler +
smaller.
http://business.lieske-elektronik.de/print_Micro-Star-International-
Co.-9513-010-Barebone-MSI-MS9513-Zubeh%F6r-Mini-PCI-ATI-Rage-XL-
Grafikkarte__653502.htm
(sory for the long link)
33Euro = 44$
Weird thing - I cant find them in $ countries, only Germany and Russia
.
This, or you can hack ordinary PCI card (lots of soldering). You can
hack ATI rage cards, matrox, even Voodoo3 PCI. Almost every 3.3V
compatible PCI vga card with framebuffer driver under Linux will work.
Lets sum it up. 61+23+44-20=108$
Not quite two times, but damn close. And can be three times cheaper if
you decide to hack the VGA card yourselfe (not counting the labour).
This thing is designed for the developing countries - labour is cheap
there. Soldring ~50 connections for 5$ is a normal practice.
You get LTP for a printer/scanner.
Mouse connected to RS232, Keyboard to leftover IO pins (7 leds are
driven from GPIO), or You can buy 5$ 4 port USB HUB and connect USB
mouse/keyboard/camera/whatever.
Those are all commodity parts from retail sources. Now imagine the bulk
prices for >xxxx quantities.
It can be easily done. Just nobody has done it before for a large
scale.
Pozdrawiam.
