Hello forum! I am new here, honestly came for a download but now since I have read about the community shrinking and I have to join and become an active member, might as well try to be a good member!
I own 3 Casio A11s, and in addition have both CE 1 and 2 for them. I have played with them (and continue to play with them) but I have decided I am going to try something bold, as I love the form factor (mostly), but 4MB RAM and that SH3 crawl is a little drole nowadays. Here is my vision (It has been a vision for 3 years but I want to pick up the project again, maybe there are some people in here who know a bit about A11 hardware):
I love this form factor. I wish computers were made in this form factor today. So I am gutting my ugliest cassiopeia. The goal is to make a modern, albeit simple, computer with the ability to connect to modern wireless networks and act as a terminal for my home server. I want it to have ludicrously long battery life (hence looking at this particular package with a simple reflective lcd).
Plans to achieve this:
In the pcmcia card slot I envision a big fat lipo battery. I can also see reusing the battery bay, but I really want this thing to be like 50% battery. Maybe a dual battery setup. I will be designing a new motherboard that will fit the existing mount points inside the case. At minimum, it will contain a raspberry pi compute module or a raspberry pi zero. It will also contain a wifi chip (Or I will use the pi zero + w).
Stretch goals:
Me being me, I want to continue to have an IR blaster so that I can unsuspiciously mess with random appliances. Ideally, I would have an HDMI output, along with a couple USB interfaces. I am not sure how I would do this. On the one hand, I could go the aesthetically simple route and put a usb type c connector behind the serial/power connector door. This would likely be a monster to implement on the circuit board, but a very elegant (and modern) looking solution. Alternatively, there is ample room for lots of different types of connectors on the pcmcia slot opening side of the computer, so in this case there is no clear answer yet as I am too early to determine how best use available connector space.
The hard part:
Reverse engineering the screen interface and the keyboard interface. I know the keyboard is probably a diode matrix, so it shouldn't be too too hard to figure out how to scan it and interface it with the Pi, but the screen is going to be a whole other ball game. I have only been able to find a service manual for the A20 and I hear that it uses a different screen protocol than the A11. If I have to ditch the touch digitizer, that's fine, but of course ideally I wouldn't want to.
Please, encourage me to pursue this. I hope someone finds this concept cool! Please let me know your thoughts, and most of all, if you have any idea if it is possible to use a standard display output from an RPI with the Casio LCD.
Nice to meet you all!