Re: What bedside clock for a HA-er?

[Kim Wall <kim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Paul Gordon wrote:

> But it does have some significant downsides, such as power
> consumption, hardware requirements, the amount of work required to
> design, customise & implement the whole thing (it's by no means
"out
> of the box"), and not least the concerns over reliability.

Yeah.  We had a spare laptop so figured we might as well put it to use.
If starting from scratch, I'd probably want something smaller and
neater, probably with a touchscreen.

Perhaps some sort of PDA would be a good off-the-shelf solution,
probably involving a bluetooth or wifi net connection and a nice docking
station.  The issue then would be software - basic media playing and
alarm stuff should be simple enough, but control of HA would probably be
limited to a web browser unless you feel like writing custom
applications.  I'd also worry about stability - will it require weekly
reboots like my XDA?  Or have weird battery-management issues from
spending 99% of its life on a cradle?


> If you run a CF card instead of a HDD, what OS do you run? - I'm
> guessing it's not any flavour of Windows on that hardware...


A fairly minimal install of Debian stable, though in principle there's
no reason you couldn't run windows from CF (given a big enough card and
an expectation that it'll probably need to be replaced after n squillion
writes...).  You can get CF-IDE adaptors (for both desktops and laptops
- look on ebay) which make the card appear as a standard hard drive, so
the OS doesn't know the difference, though clearly it's preferable to
set it up in such a way that it minimises the number of writes to the
card (no swap, system logs, that sort of thing).


Kim.


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