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Ask Slashdot: Hackable Portable Music Player For Helicopters?
First time accepted submitter mrhelio writes "I work for a medium-sized helicopter company; we mainly fly tourists around on sightseeing flights. My company needs help finding a hacker-friendly portable music player for our helicopters. We have a problem with our onboard music players — mostly because it is an obsolete terrible design. The manufacturer has made an updated model, but it's basically the same obsolete design with the same terrible software and user interface. We are worried about spending $1000 per unit on these because the manufacturer will eventually stop making replacement units and then we will be force to buy upgrades for our entire fleet again and get everything recertified. (Any piece of equipment hard mounted in a commercial aircraft has to be certified by the FAA and it takes a lot of paper work, time and money for that to happen.) So we have a new plan: get portable music players like iPods, and plug those into the aux input in the intercom system. We need something that has nine hours of battery life, can hold at least three hours of music, and has remote control options for start, stop, volume, and selecting tracks and playlists, and a display that is visible in bright and sunny as well as dark conditions. The remote control option is the toughest part to find. The pilots need to be able to control the music without taking their hands off the flight controls for safety reasons. There are buttons and toggle switches already designed into the flight controls for these kind of purposes and we have mechanics/ engineers that can wire it all together, but the music player has to support the remote interface in the first place. Our first choice would be to give each pilot an iPod, but Apple is notoriously anti-hacking and anti-open source, plus you have to pay them ridiculous licensing fees to get access to their USB interface. So we are looking for a manufacturer that is open source / hacker friendly and makes something that meets our needs. Do you know of anything that would work for us? Maybe something that runs Rockbox? Should we just break down and design something from scratch like the Butterfly MP3 player?"
what utter nonsense. neither portable GPS nor intercoms nor timing devices nor "PCATD-lite" things nor any of the other portable gadgets that go in an aircraft have to be "certified" by the FAA.
/ 20 year flight instructor, owner of an aviation company / terrible slashdot karma for routinely calling out BS that others mark "insightful"
Yeah, well, you'd be surprised. People out there get bitchy and moany when they have to go two seconds without listening to Nickelback or Maroon 5. I remember a sightseeing tour by car through magical China, stopping at hilltop monasteries and having tea at amazing teahouses with breathtaking views. Real Kung Fu movie stuff, live and in the flesh. My two co-tourists couldn't believe that the car didn't have any music other than a couple of crappy Chinese dance music CDs and didn't have a USB port to accept input from their music players. I was like, uh, these are amazing views and we're doing amazing things today, is it OK if we go without music for eight hours? You'd have thought I suggested we drink out of a bucket of warm spit, to judge by the disgusted reactions on their faces to this unwelcome suggestion. Seriously, I'm pretty sure it ruined the trip for them. I had an awesome time.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Either an iOS device is the best solution or it isn't. If it is, and $99 will stop you from doing it, or running your own code isn't free enough for you, then you're letting your idealism get in the way of the best solution.
Solve the right problem. The insistence on solving problems we want to solve rather than problems we're asked to solve is one reason IT is seen as a thorn rather than an asset.