[FoRK] Cheap Electronics Dissection Project

[zooko at zooko.com]

>From the perspective of a parent of a 5-year old and a 2-year old, Vtech are
one of the two leaders in the field of fancy electronic educational toys for
babies, toddlers, and pre-schoolers.  The other is LeapFrog.  (My wife, Amber,
worked at LeapFrog when it was a start-up a decade ago.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTech
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrog_Enterprises_Inc

In my subjective opinion, LeapFrog toys are more likely to have better
user-interaction and educational design.

Wow -- check this out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_%28pentop_computer%29


In a related story, I've been shopping for a wristwatch.  I want a watch that 
I can trigger with a quick button sequence to take a timestamp under a given
category, e.g. "I just woke up.", "I'm about to go to sleep.", "I just started
work on Project X.", etc.  Then I want to be able to tranfer the history of
such timestamps to a computer.

Although I have found wristwatches with a lot of other silly features, I
haven't yet found one with this ability.  My friend Sebastian helped me realize
that perhaps what I really want is a programmable wristwatch.  Then I realized
that this was somewhat near to what you (Kragen) are currently researching.

So consider that if the power requirements and form factor are tiny enough,
there may be a market for such a device even in the rich world.

Regards,

Zooko