Amstrad e-m@iler

[MartinM57]

I notice that a Post Office (GB) I was in today had a load of these (horrible!) Amstrad devices on the floor, reduced to 10.99GBP each. IIRC they were either 89 or 99GBP at launch...

In the spirit of reuse, does anyone know if the LCD screen is re-usable, in terms of it being easy to remove and interface to?

[Fowkc]

Ooo, which Post Office? I wonder if my local one has them...

I have no idea if the LCD is re-useable. These sort of things tend to be beyond my ability to do so anyway...

[MartinM57]

Camberley, Surrey - which is nowhere near where I live BTW and some 3hrs later I'm already 120 miles away so it's a bit of a trek to go back and get one!

[hippy]

Tesco and elsewhere have them at knock-down prices too.

For those who don't have a clue what it is ...

http://www.amstrad.com/emailer_plus.html

Rubbish subscription model IMO, with it always dialling out once a day to collect email and generate revenue for Amstrad. Call costs to do email and browsing aren't cheap. Amstrad reportedly took a 4m GBP loss on the first version and don't seem to have fared any better this time round. Apparently lost a CEO over Sugar's obsession with it.

No one did much work on the earlier version and I never found any useful LCD info a couple of years ago, but there does seem to be more interest in the latest version, perhaps because it runs Linux ( or maybe that's only the E3 video phone ? ) ...

http://inputplus.co.uk/ralph/emailer/

And some info on the LCD here ...

http://inputplus.co.uk/ralph/emailer/e2_pinouts.txt

Even if the LCD itself is of no use, it may be possible to re-box the whole lot and use it as a PICAXE LCD server or a server in its own right. At the price it may be worth buying one just to leave on a shelf until someone does reverse engineer it.

Edited by - hippy on 1/27/2006 4:00:53 PM