Epson EHT -40 Handheld 386

[themendist]

Hi All.

I recently acquired one of these little machines hoping to use it to store some G code from my CNC lathe. Both the PC and the lathe are RS232 serial ports.
I cannot find any information online about the EHT 40 except some very basic stuff.
Does anyone have any documents for this machine?
Any information would be very helpful.

Thanks Keith (UK)

 

[oktology]

Can we get some pics?

 

[themendist]

 

[themendist]

The computer is DOS based 6.22
Approximate size 90 mm x 180mm x40mm.
On screen Keyboard
9Pin D socket
Power supply socket
2 x PCMCIA slots
Approximate date of manufacture is 1995
I think they were originally intended to be used with barcode readers in warehouses or as Point Of Sales terminals.
On the back there is an iRDA port a docking station port and some brass connectors which may be for charging.
I have found very little information on the net.
There is something on YouTube but it isn't very helpful.

Many thanks,

Keith

 

[NeXT]

BuMPing this a year later as I have an EHT-30 on the way.
There's very little information available online beyond one video from ExTableta a few years ago.

There is zero information on the printer, much less a part number other than it's likely using the PCMCIA slot. There is a docking station available with the P/N H1020AEA which is similarly unobtanium (but not really needed) and the battery is in fact an InfoLithium NP-F550 cell, looking at photographs.

 

[Paralel]

Any idea what the difference is between the EHT-30 and EHT-40 are?

 

[fritzeflink]

I can't help but the grandfather of both is the ETH10 with a Z80.

 

[NeXT]

Any idea what the difference is between the EHT-30 and EHT-40 are?

It seems that the major difference is memory and CPU speed? Hard to tell. In the meantime I did find that the EHT's briefly saw use in the late 90's at the NYSE with an early IBM wireless LAN card plugged into the PCMCIA slot but even then details are extremely sparse.



Slightly related to a BuMP, the discussion of what to with this again came up and someone suggested if you could possibly run PenPoint OS on this as the biggest problem remains that unless you have an application that is aware of the on-screen keyboard emulation, the portrait oriented display and the digitizer, nothing you can think of works or fits the screen correctly.

I'm reading the 1992 issue of the PenPoint development documentation and the answer unfortunately is no. While you might be able to get away with Windows for Pen Computing if you write a portrait driver (I do have the SDK but resources might be too tight), the EHT's have CGA emulation, not VGA that anyone can tell unless there's an extra video mode neither of us could touch. The other issue is the unit does not have enough ram, even if you disable the RAMdisk.

 

[NeXT]

...aaaaaand it's too late to edit but I've triple checked and no, Windows for Pen Computing 1.0 will work with 2mb ram minimum but you need at least a VGA resolution display. WfPC 2.0 requires at least 4mb.
PenDOS was another consideration, however because the EHT boots with DOS in ROM you would have to do some pretty drastic work to patch that out and even then you still would probably not have hardware support out of the box.


This was a total trap. It is an x86 computer that has a PC compatible BIOS and CGA emulation but it's completely unusable unless you develop software that's aware of the special considerations (limitations) of the hardware.