Author: LaTeX (212.234.70.194)
Date: 04-20-2004 14:12
Hi again.
This is why I was interested by your project.
Nowaday a lot of electronic gears are put inside cars. DVD player, GPS for example...
I own a car DVD player with a screen separated from the player itself. For kids to stay quiet during long trip, DVD movies are good solutions. If I could have added video games, they would have been less boring of movies for a 4h trip long. So I thought about using the little screen to plug my ST on it. The fact is that ST need 12V supply as car could give. The only operation to power up a ST on a car is to remove the original power supply and replace it with some electronic filtre that would make alternator voltage straitly constant to 12V and a LM7805 componant to supply the 5V.
But the problem is that the little screen is composit video signal input only, not RGB. So a RBG to composit convertor is needed. I had a look for one componant that deal with. There are several ones : AD724, AD725, M1377, etc. Most of them are obsolete. You simply can't find them with your provider. Those which are still sold are expansive : 53 euros for an AD724 ! And you need a quartz, some resistors, capacitors in addition. Some other ones are quite cheap but you need a delay line componant to assemble with. Delay lines are expansives an I didn't found the one which was needed. So I give up the story.
My thought was not limited to video games. I realised that if I had an IDE interface on it I would have been able to store some map pictures on it and design a little software that display and scroll them on screen to find my way. Not a GPS application of course, but... no more paper maps that injure themselves each time you fold an unfold them.
As I thought as well that a hard disk in a car is not a good thing because of road vibration, and as I found on a magazine the schema of a PC serial to USB adaptator based on a "MAX something" componant I dreamed to store maps on a memory stick instead of an hard disk. But I didn't go further because I suppose that the serial speed limitation on an ST to be a problem for such an adaptator.
End of the story again.
As I said, I have not much time and experiances with electronics but your project could be quite interesting.
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