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Okay. Lost me now. Why would you want to replace the empeg with something that whilst cheaper, is exactly the same physical size/shape and does less?


because it could potentially be produced for less than the cost of the 160GB drive in it. (think chip on board and metalized plastic)

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There aren't that many off the shelf laptop PC parts. The only ones I can readily think of are HDs, miniPCI cards and memory. Everything else is usually part of a single motherboard that is custom made to fit into that specific laptop. I think you could just about wedge a NanoITX board into a DIN slot but it'd be a tight fit with the HDs and PSU as well.


What I meant by off the shelf was the processor and related chip sets, it would be in essence a custom PC in a DIN case with the extra unneeded crap omitted. IE no

Battery charger,PCMCIA,PS2,keyboard/mouse interface,video card,printer port.

just OLED display w/touch screen interface,serial ports,USB on the go,fire wire,bluetooth,irda,802.11 something,kick ass audio chip set w/digital out+RCA,ATA interface,a few geek ports. and being an X86 compatible it can run Linux. The same board could also be mounted in 1.5 or 2 DIN case for larger displays or a potential 3.5" drive.

For the tuner I'd use a CATV brick as they tune from almost DC to about 550MHz, thus allowing AM, all broad cast TV audio, FM, CB, FRS+GMRS, a bunch of HAM bands, and if you can get quadrature from the IF section and feed it into a DSP you can get SSB reception and a slew of digital modes including DAB, DRM (can be decoded via sound card using DReaM, and probably a few others I've forgotten.
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