Hi Neutronflux
Sorry I don't currently have any plans on doing a new OS. If I did build my own OS, I would write a stripped bare bones one that would allow me to run programs with some less overhead.
I thought about your OS project in your thread.
http://www.linux-hacker.net/cgi-bin/UltraBoard/UltraBoard.pl?Action=ShowPost&Board=EpodsOne&Post=1370&Idle=0&Sort=0&Order=Descend&Page=0&Session=
Obviously we all would love to have a Pocket PC OS so that we could run all the cool new programs on our epods but I would guess that it would be very difficult to reach that compatability unless you had the source code of the Pocet PC OS. So knowing that a pocket PC OS is hard to reach we could attempt CE 3.0. I believe that source is public for that but is the effort to upgrade the epods to 3.0 going to gain that many advantages for us. We could write a unique OS but then what is we are truly trying to accomplish. My guess it would be Pocket PC so that puts us back to the top of this paragraph.
So I am content with CE 2.12 (I think that is the official number)and I write programs that meet my needs. As far as how to write programs for the epods it is easy to do the builds using the MS embedded tools that I mentioned above. When I first tried it out 4 months ago I had down my first "Hello World" program in VB and running in the emulator in the first 5 minutes and then I had it running on the epods in the next 5 minutes. Basically if you know how to program in VB or VC++ thaen you will have no problems doing a CE build.
One neat program I wrote was for my father in law. He was in the hospital this last summer with a tracheotomy and was too weak to have that kazoo voice box thing in for long. The program I wrote for the epods has 20 big buttons show up on the screen and he could push them with his finger and different .WAV files would play out of the speaker. Half of the .WAV files were my young kids saying things like "I want to go home", "Thank you" and "I want to take a nap". The other half were sound bites I found on the internet: Bart Simpson "I hate this place" and Harrison Ford (Star Wars) "I have a bad feeling about this".
The version I wrote was crudely written and everything is hard coded into it. I want to change it around so that when it starts up it reads a text file that is comma delimited that has the text buton name (as you want it to appear on the epods) and the WAV file. Once I have it written that way I was considering posting it somewhere for everyone to download so that it would be easy for anyone to change what the buttons did by just changing around the text file.
Anyway I keep thinking about program ideas to do on the epods and even though I think it is a cool machine I can't think of anything so neat that I need to start coding it. Does anyone out there have any ideas? I would gladly write them for free to share with everyone if it is something that sounds interesting.
slimtim
