LCD Touch Screen "PDA"s for Kids?

John Q. Public asks: "I've seen the commercials on the usual children oriented channels this weekend, but I can find no technical data on the Mattel/Tyco Playtime/Fisher-Price Pixter, which investor and general press releases call a PDA for kids. It appears to have a 100x100 (or so) pixel 2 color touch-sensitive LCD 'with audio,' and accepts optional ROM packs for new functionality. I'd rush right out and buy one, but Amazon has the best price I've seen so far (US$40). Does anyone have any knowledge of these devices, specifically processor and 'ROM pack' details? Though I don't think I can pry the I Opener with the DOS based games away from my 3.5 year old, the Pixter might make road trips a bit more fun."

Wow.

[angelo]

This is a really neat device. I'd love to take one and rip its guts out to build an info display for my server. I don't have a monitor on that machine, so something like this would be welcome. The large lcd would be nice for displaying bar graphs etc. It's head and shoulders above an Orbital display, bar the easy orbital interface.

Looks like you need these sites:

[gorillasoft]

If you haven't already seen them -

http://lcdproc.omnipotent.net/
Software for your LCD screen.

http://www.matrixorbital.com/
LCD source

Crystalfontz has them in the $45 US price range.
http://www.crystalfontz.com/cgi-bin/pricing.pl?p ro duct=634

I think I had one of these when I was a kid...

[iforgotmyfirstlogon]

Mine had a larger screen and a red case. It was from the days before pen-based computing, but it had cursor controls built into the case. You shook it upside-down to reboot.

- Freed

Re:I think I had one of these when I was a kid...

[iforgotmyfirstlogon]

Apparently someone has made a more advanced version [carleton.ca] of my childhood handheld.

- Freed

Something funny (slightly OT)...

[cr0sh]

If you google on "pixter" and "hacking", "hack", or "interface" (I was curious whether anything has been tried with this device yet), for some reason you seem to get a fair share of "porn" style links...

Any I/O?

[Russ Nelson]

Does it have any I/O interfaces?

If nothing else, you could get a single output bit by latching an address bit whenever a certain location in the rom is fetched. And you could get a single input bit by giving up half the rom's address space, and attaching the input bit to the rom's most significant address bit. Duplicate the half ROM's contents, only have one subroutine in the upper half return a one instead of a zero.

Hack, hack.
-russ

When will they learn

[Rick the Red]

They will probably sell 100,000 of these to parents. If they followed the Lego Mindstorms model by publishing internal details and encouraging hacking they would probably sell another 100,000 of them. But Matell is probably afraid that if they published the specs then someone they haven't yet bought out might release something similar. As if any competitor would need published specs to copy this idea.

How long before software that does this same thing is available for the Palm OS?

Apple eMate

[kescom]

Apple made a version of their Newton called the eMate. It came in five familiar colors...

There's a lot of information on the web, easily accessible with Google [google.com], but here's some for starters:
eMate 300 Review [thereviewzone.com]
MessagePad 2100, 2000 and eMate [the-gadgeteer.com]

You can still find these pretty often on eBay [ebay.com].

Does anyone remember "The Animator"?

[RedCard]

When I was a kid (early-mid 80s) I had this toy called "The animator". It looked a lot like an etch-a-sketch, but with an LCD screen. You could create pictures on its bw screen, copy them, and animate them. I think you could store something like 8-10 images.

The year after I got it, they came out with an advanced version called the "Animator 2000" which had a stylus and a touch screen.

This pixter thing bears an uncanny resemblance to the Animator 2000, except for the price and the fact that the pixter can take expansion cartridges, and the colour has changed. (The animators were grey with blue buttons, IIRC)

I've tried to find links for these, but to no avail. It was a pretty cool toy, though.

--R

Have the carrionsound folks heard of this?!

[Baconator]

I can see it now...

this is the mothership of aleoric glitch wastelands. 1/4" output, speaker/1/4" switch, external clock power on/off (w/ blue led). use pen to create intensly painful screetching sounds!!!

Y'know what I hate about Ask Slashdot?

[Russ Nelson]

Y'know what I hate about Ask Slashdot? So very few people read it. And yet, some of the questions posed are very interesting. But the only Ask Slashdots that get any attention at all are the ones that make it to the top page.
-russ