Odd ideas that I've had lately...

I was sitting at home reading my latest copy of Mouser (component catalog) and I came across LCD GUI touch screen kits and Zilog Z80 kits with USB, Serial and 100Mbit Ethernet. My head being screwed up from pain killers (on worker's comp from slipping on ice at a client's), tried to put 2+5 together to get 4 and gave me an expensive (maybe not) idea. Palms and Visors and the like are really small and great for many tasks, but what if I could take a similar processor, say a Dragonball, an ARM or the even an older one (maybe even a mobile RISC-based CPU - now that would be cool) and link them into a slightly larger and more useful hand-held that has USB, Serial and Ethernet with AD and DC capabilities and toss it into a steel box with rubber seals and rubber/knurled steel outsides and a thin plastic piece covering the display with a metal lock-back cover. I know there are knock-off covers out there for the Visor and the Palm that are sold separately, but the palm doesn't have built in USB or Ethernet or Serial, you are stuck with a bulky add-on or a cradle. What If someone could get around that? Anyone have some thoughts to it? Next leap into less than sanity... I actually considered sitting down and getting a prototype board from another mail order company the other day to build my own AT P200MMX motherboard with PC100/133 SD-RAM support, AGPx and ISA/PCI. Now here's where the idea for this would require the prototype board: built in USB and Ethernet and possibly SCSI on a standard AT board in as small a size as possible while enabling use of as many slots in the back of an AT case for the AGPx, PCI and ISA. I was thinking of using something like an AMD-based Ethernet chip with the prototype board's VIA motherboard chipset. Anyone have comments? Kind of lame or just expensive and nuts? -John Boffemmyer IV ---------------------------------------- Founder, Lead Writer, Tech Analyst and Web Designer Boff-Net Technologies http://boff-net.dhs.org/index.html ---------------------------------------