Casio Cassiopeia IT-700 Manual de usuario descargar pdf (Pagina 8)

The Cassiopeia uses a 117 x 60mm touch sensitive screen for the user inter-

face instead of a mouse. It is also one of the few HPCs on the market that pro-

vide a backlight screen — perfect for playing Solitaire in bed.

ning the Cassiopeia with a PCMCIA

device, such as a modem.

I was quite surprised to find that the

Cassiopeia's current consumption was

maintained at lmA when the unit was

turned off. This current drain was pre-

sumably for the battery backed RAM,

and would mean that the batteries would

need replacing on a regular basis,

whether you used it or not.

I measured the current consumption

of the Cassiopeia (without the modem)

at 65mA. The supply current rose to

275mA whenever the Cassiopeia was

processing input, or when the screen

was touched with the stylus. This was

obviously a sleep-between-keystrokes

power saving system as used in many

laptop computers, and would explain

the long battery life.

This current jumped to over 600mA

(and peaked at over 1000mA) when the

modem was installed and running.

Within a minute, a pop-up window

informed us that the main batteries were

getting low and would need changing.

Of course, if you have the backlight on

you can add an extra 100mA to all of the

above figures.

With such a high current drain, you

couldn't really consider using the

Cassiopeia with a modem without

some form of external power, such as

a plugpack.

Unfortunately, the Cassiopeia does-

n't have the usual DC power socket

found on most pieces of electronic

equipment, and so the only way to

power it is with batteries or a specially

designed docking station. This docking

station is available from Casio for $90,

and you will also need to buy the

matching plugpack for a further $90.

A bit pricey perhaps? Well, when you

-0,7,

w *R

Cassiopeia A-11

A hand-held personal computer running

Windows CE. It comes with 4MB RAM,

and a backlit 480 x 240 touch screen.

Good points:

Nice sensitive touch-

sreen, reasonably robust, same price as

other models that don't include a backlight.

Bad points:

You have to buy a docking

station in order to run it off a plugpack.

RRP:

The Cassiopeia A-11 is $999, or

$899 for the A-10 2MB model. The dock-

ing station is $90, and the matching plug-

pack $90. The Comport SA-MC218 28.8k

PCMCIA modem is $595.

Available:

The Cassiopeia is available

from most Brashs stores, and other major

electrical retailers. More details on the

Cassiopeia and on the availability of the

Comport modem are available from

Mobex Pty. Ltd., 72-74 Gibbes St.,

Chatswood NSW 2067. Phone (02) 9370

9100.

compare it with the Cassiopeia' s $999

price tag, perhaps not...

What's inside?

Of course, being an electronics enthu-

siast at heart, I couldn't resist opening

the case to see what was inside, and I

was quite surprised at the small number

of ICs on the single PC (mother?) board.

There was the Hitachi H3 CPU, plus

two large custom chips manufactured

by Casio — one of which was the dis-

play driver, the other being the ROM.

The only other ICs were a small 16-

pin device and two 1MB RAM chips.

The extra 2MB of RAM was mounted

on a small removable PCB, accessible

via a removable cover on the back of

the Cassiopeia.

The rest of the main board was taken

up with a forest of SMD components

and a number of rather large inductors,

obviously part of the power supply.

Once I'd re-assembled it, I decided to

run the Cassiopeia from a 3V power sup-

ply connected to the battery terminals, so

that I could try out the modem for more

than a couple of minutes at a time.

I had planned to use the Cassiopeia to

connect to the Internet, and so the first

thing to do was to install Pocket Internet

Explorer. This is supplied on CD, as

part of the Microsoft Windows CE

package. At this point I was well and

truly stuck, as it turned out that I needed

Windows 95 on my desktop machine in

order to install HPC Explorer. Here at

we run Windows 3.11 on all of our

office machines, and so I had to try

again on my Win95 machine at home.

Having installed HPC Explorer on my

home computer, I was then able to use it

to install Pocket Internet Explorer onto

the Cassiopeia. The whole procedure

was fairly straightforward, with HPC

Explorer showing the directory structure

as though it were a remote drive.

(Which indeed it was.)

Once Pocket Internet Explorer was

installed on the HPC, I set it up with the

usual DNS and IP address information as

well as the telephone number of my ISP.

Internet in a box

With the modem installed into my

jury-rig setup, I was able to log on to my

ISP and start surfing the Net.

Surprisingly, web pages don't look that

bad on the Cassiopeia. In fact the transla-

tion to a 480 x 240 pixel display works

quite well, with a 640-pixel wide page

scaled to fit into the 480-pixel screen.

Yes, the graphics do suffer a bit, and fine

bitmapped text is difficult to read, but on

(Continued on page 78)

ELECTRONICS Australia, September 1997

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