Want to wear your video on your sleeve? Wearaware Design hacked the cradle for the Archos line of video devices in ways that make the device both more practical and more … wearable. How? By eliminating the cradle, an always-worthy goal:
The cradle itself is not necessary for accessing any of the A/V i/o ports at all: the signals pass right on through. The cradle is bulky, wasted space; its octopus of fixed cabling is long, messy, and weighs more than the cradle itself. All the cradle really offers is IR and Serial protocols and a power tap for the meager circuitry. Plus, with a serial-USB dongle, and perhaps a microcontroller you can still likely add them without the cradle.
With less space, it’s possible to wear around your Archos video player around. And since the Archos has video outs, this could quickly become a fabulous VJ/visualist tool. Media artist/designer (or, we’d say, visualist) Ross Bochnek presented his hacks at a Maker workbench over the weekend at Maker Faire:
Archos PMA/AV Series Cradle Connector Cloning (Detailed instructions at at pointlisse.com)
Wearable Computing Hacks (workbench details at makerfaire.com)
Now, I need to see if I can learn from this lesson to eliminate every single unreliable Sony connector I have on my DV cam.