RE: A quick Ethernet/Wireless straw poll please

["Nigel Giddings" <nigel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ian,

My personal preferance would be to use CAT5 if the unit is to be fixed.

If the unit was portable,could be removed from the wall with
rechargeable batteries (or sat on a charging stand) then Wi-Fi would
obviously be the way to go.

The price of USB WiFi units would lean me this way, easy to plug in and
remove depending on application...

Nigel

-----Original Message-----
From: ian.bird@xxxxxxx
[mailto:ian.bird@xxxxxxx]
Sent: 12 November 2004 10:23
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: [ukha_d] A quick Ethernet/Wireless straw poll please



Hi everyone

I am building an HA touch screen controller for wall mounting which will

have an Ethernet interface for communication to the rest of the world.
This will run a menu system which will send text based messages over
Ethernet e.g. xAP, xPL, home-brew etc. + a lot more functionality.
Currently this has a simple 10Mbit CAT5 interface.

Now, my questions are........
1) If you were going to use one of these systems how highly would you
rate
a wireless 802.11b interface?
2) Since the hardware to make this a reality costs money what would you
think is a reasonable extra amount to pay for wireless? A finger in the
wind guess would be about 80 pounds extra (on top of the original units
estimated price) for the wireless versions. If I do fit wireless I would

not produce a non wireless version as supporting two interfaces would be

too expensive and complicated.

If I did go wireless my units would have a 10/100 wired CAT5 interface
OR
wireless 802.11b (but not both at the same time). This would be software

configurable somehow.

Opinions or thoughts folks?

Ian



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]