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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?"
Don't forget this requirement: whenever the airman presses the push-to-talk button, you want the music to stop. I'm pretty sure the ATC controller will not be interested in your playlist...
Other than that: why don't you just use the auxiliary input of the 4-way intercom?
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
I'm no audio expert or pilot, but it seems an adequate setup was designed in the 1970's. I could see this schema working well in cases of mechanical malfunction or unusually feisty tourists, though I suspect you could always choose a different act for more conventional flights.
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
As a tourist who's been on one or two small, sightseeing aircraft - can I suggest going without the music?
Especially on a helicopter where the background noise is already quite phenomenal, going without some barely-audible music warbling away over the headset is hardly going to impair my experience. I'd much rather be looking out the windows (or absence thereof) and listening to what the pilot has to say...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
If you spend more than 20 hours to engineer something yourself, the $1000 starts to look like a bargain.
We are talking about a helicopter - something that flies
It's important that whatever that gets played on board does not interfere with the RF sensitive equipment on board of the chopper
Nowadays airplanes from Boeing and Airbus have re-designed their planes to better shield themselves from whatever interfering RF that may emit from consumer electronics - from cellphones to laptops to tablets
I do not know if the choppers are similarly shielded from RF interference, though
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I don't know where you got this from. Apple has no problems putting open source software on the App Store, for example. Some open source software developers however have a problem with that.
To put your own code onto an iPod Touch, what you need is a Mac, $99 for a developer account, and you can install any software you write on up to 200 iOS devices of your choice. No need for hacking at all. No restrictions on what your code does.
Grab a few old Android devices--maybe N1s--turn off their cellular and wifi radios, load them up with music, and use 3.5 mm audio cable converted to whatever your aux input is on your existing system. Some 3.5mm audio cable can be purchased with/cobbled together to include built-in play, pause, and track skip buttons... Also, there's the rooting factor for most Android devices as well as the fact that most non-Apple smartphones use some variant of microUSB for charging and syncing.
Why don't you use Pandoras?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_pandora
They have great battery life, are very hacker-friendly, and great audio.
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"
Large library size (160gbs), loooong battery life and very friendly to RockBox
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowon#MP3_players
It is not about software, but about hardware. Apple requires you to buy a chip from them to "identify" your accessory as "runs with iphone" if you want it to do anything more than plain audio out. That is what the OP is talking about.
Considering this, I'd be looking for some iphone/ipod dock that has all the buttons you want and is certified. Rip that out of it's enclosure, connect your own buttons to it and you'll have your interface. No need to reinvent the wheel here, just adjust the packaging to your needs.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
One thing that I'd like to point out is that the RF problem has diminished by the user devices themselves. When you go from 12V switching to under 1V, you're looking at a lot less RF interference coming from the device anyways. Go from kilohertz to mega/gigahertz and you up the interference frequencies; lowering the range they can travel and the odds they'll interfere with the much slower switching electronics in the craft.
Basically, at this point it's hard to tell the average portable consumer device from background noise, as long as it's not intentionally transmitting.
I don't read AC A human right
I wonder if you could modify something originally intended for a car?
Newer aftermarket stereos often have aux input, a USB port for flash sticks and sometimes you'll find they've already paid Apple for iPod connectivity so you wouldn't have to. You can even find models with remote control support, though if you want to use existing remote controls I think you'll have to reverse engineer how the manufacturer's done it and make your own adaptor. This should be perfectly doable, however, as there's an existing industry that does exactly this so the steering-wheel remote controls you find built into many modern cars can be adapted to function with the aftermarket head unit. You might even be able to find a company that'll work with you to do the job just for the fun of it.
They're dead easy to wire in - they come with a fairly straightforward loom already there and there's a range of plugs on the market so you could build your own loom, fit a standard plug to it and when the manufacturer discontinues the stereo, put in another one that's close enough with minimal extra modification. They're already in a steel case so I don't imagine shielding will be a big deal.
They're also cheap enough that you should be able to pick something suitable up for a fifth, maybe even a tenth of the obsolete units you don't like.
The only thing I'm not sure about is getting FAA certification...
Last time I was in a plane as a passenger I plugged my regular earphone to the IFE. I'm almost certain that they are not specificaly certified.
This is essentially correct. If the device interfaces with the aircraft interphone system (or any other aircraft system), it must be certified for use on YOUR aircraft model. On the other hand if the aircraft has a utility bus with a 115 volt AC outlet, you can more or less plug in anything within the limits of the associated circuit breaker's current rating. As an example, some airline crews are now using iPads and laptops within the flight deck.
You may be able to engineer in a system separate from aircraft systems that is accessible to the flight crew. Such a system would still require approval of your local FAA inspector, but would not require the TSO approval (http://www.faa.gov/aircraft/air_cert/design_approvals/tso/) of an off the shelf system purchased from your friendly avionics vendor.
I would suggest discussing your desires with your local FAA inspector assigned to your operations. They will be able to point you down the right path.
Only if they play Wagner exclusively and require you to bring a surfboard.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
We have a problem with our onboard music players
and
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.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but I'm pretty sure that music was indeed mentioned.
-1 troll is not supposed to be used simply because you don't agree
Put giant speakers outside the helo (by the rocket pods) and blast Ride of the Valkries
1) Find three more helicopters
2) Learn to play alltogether this
3) ? ? ?
4) Profit!
Those who are curious to hear the piece can find it here. Please don't play it over my home, thanks.
Nobody mentioned music, you moron. This is for the sightseeing record, so that people know what to look for.
I'm not sure what a "sightseeing record" is but music was definitely mentioned.
People would know what to look for because the pilot has a voice.
No sig today...
The remote is going to be the difficult part, especially if you want to choose playlists.
I've recently bought an iPod nano 6G and found it unusable in my car: the touch screen means you have to look at the device to operate it, and I'm not going to do that while driving.
So I bought an iJet Nav remote with physical buttons for pause, next track, and previous track (also volume up and down, but those are not necessary in my setup). This gives me enough control for the things I want to do while driving, and the pysical buttons mean that I can operate them without looking.
The Nano 6G will operate with the iJet Nav attached for about 5 hours on battery power.
Choosing a different playlist is going to be way too distracting however you set it up. The only acceptable option I've seen is an iPod linked to a car stereo through the CD changer input. Dension (I think) makes a device that will do this, and it will map 6 playlists to the Disc 1-6 buttons on the car stereo, so choosing a new playlist is a matter of pressing one button.
I think you'll have to plan ahead and have an appropriate playlist cued up before you take off.
Have a look at Qi Hardware's NanoNote. It seems like it it fit the bill pretty well, especially if you pair it with TuxBrain's Universal Breakout Board (a small breakout board that plugs into the NanoNote's MicroSD port).
I've bought two NanoNotes for use as portable music players (one for me, one for my wife). We've been running MPD + ncmpc on them (which makes it convenient to either browse or search for songs), along with smart auto-DJ (which means that you can just pick a song to start with, and it'll automatically keep the play-queue filled with appropriate-sounding songs), for the past two years or so.
Running just on the commodity battery that fits inside, we've found that they'll run for at least 8 hours; but they also support the addition of small external battery that'll get you another ~30 hours.
-rozzin.
I think there was news some time ago that ipads were certified by FAA as replacements of plane manuals. Why not use them as MP3 players ?
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