WarBlading II … going on III …
So a couple weeks back – before my two week long set of business trips, I headed out WarBlading again. This time I had a couple of objectives:

  1. wear the unit outside of the pack to see if the unit would run cooler.
  2. use the Olympus/Xybernaut Head-Mounted Display (HMD) that I have.

The unit ran cooler … actually all night on the single ElectroVaya battery … however I had to use the tablet display since I couldn’t get a pointing device working! It sucked!

The issue with the pointing device is that Windows 2000 would keep freaking out with the GPS and Mouse connected at the same time. I wanted to skate and had to bail.

So this Thursday will be it … I bought a new USB “miniature hand trackball” that you use with your thumb. I’m going to install it and see if that works better … we’ll see.

I also got my 2.4Ghz radios working with Win2k … so that I can see if we can do some “peer to peer” wireless exchange of GPS location information. While I was on the business trip last week, I was able to spend a lot of time, while we were driving up and down the northeast coast, working on my “waypointer” application. I am adding the “target” tab so that I can store a set of “waypoints” that I want to keep track of. While writing this I just realized that I want to have a “track on/off” capability to keep entries in this table whether I am tracking them or not … duh!

The last area of interest is the new pack. I found a great pack at REI that is made by North Face. It has a completely ventilated rear pocket that is perfect for the wearable … good cooling.

More later … and I’m making great progress with the HX2002 … I’m hoping to have some info on the web site soon …

WarBlading …
It was a very cool experience last night … I went WarBlading for the first time … and it worked! Although the temperatures were very hot, and the machine croaked a couple of times, I was able to rollerblade around Salt Lake City last night with my Xybernaut wearable computer, with a GPS connected, running NetStumbler, searching for 802.11b access points …

What really hit me is that this is going to be big … very big … and goes far beyond mapping 802.11b access points … just wait. 😉