Slashdot Mirror
Linux-powered car MP3 Player
Splatta was the first one to write in about the Linux-powered car MP3 player. The cool thing is that unlike the Rio, this thing will also let you web browse, check e-mail, and store addresses and dates. Heck, who needs an office anymore? Thanks to the folks at Empeq.
How many times are we going to have to see yet
another car MP3 player for Linux (YACMP3PFL)?
Say, can you telnet in? "Oh hell, I left my
headlights on.... "
>telnet car.blah.blah.net
......
And of course it will be a beowulf system
No more changing CDs on the road, or swapping stupid CDs, and probably not as sensitive to bumps either. Now all it needs is a little screen so folks can deathmatch with LinuxQuake while on the road...
This has been on slashdot at LEAST 3 times previously. It is interesting, but man... you guys really do need to read your own site a bit. ;-)
I don't know about that theft thing. Of course it is running Linux which IMHO ups it value. But this past winter break a friend of mine had her house broken into. The thiefs took her stereo (about 5 years old and not very great), her TV, textbooks(?!), some furniture, and her boom box.
:) Seriously though why not just "reverse" some overclocking cooling ideas to heat it? Slap that peltier on backwards! (I think I'm just kidding)
But they left the one year old Gateway PII with a 17" monitor! That computer alone was worth more than everything else they took!
Besides the things removable that's the best theft deterent out there.
As for the cold, I'm surprised it won't help you overclock it
I've been listening to my Empeg player for a week now. 1 grand and no screwing around with surplus junk. :-) and best of all no intel inside!
:-)
Dont build one just buy an empeg... it's 100000000% better than anything anyone here could come up with on their own. (BTW, I've got the development version already ordered
You stole my kernel recompile joke.
A pox on your horse.
I live in the great white north, Theft is no problem... that's what insurance is for. In fact I hope someone steals my car/stuff, that way I get a new car/stuff!
:-) Theft is not a problem, Insurance will pay for replacement. besides, anyone that would steal a stereo wouldnt know how to even operate the thing let alone plug it in. Remember Theieves are stupid morons, if they had 1/2 a brain they'd have a job.
2nd, the baloney temperature thingy. yes by product mfg standards 0 is the lower limit. start your car on a winter morning, by the time you clean off the windshield your interior is at 2 already. by the time you drive off it's at least 3-4 in there. besides, add a simple heating device (read: 2- 10 watt lamps below the unit) and it will be up to temp very very fast. now the upper limit temp range is bad. most cars get above 90C during a hot summer day. But leave the windows open and take the thing with you
I'm gonna love my Empeg player when it ships the end of this month!!!!
According to my count this is the sixth time this story has been reported at Slashdot. Am I missing any? Jeez guys, I can accept you repeating a story once... but SIX TIMES!!! What, do you own stock in empeg or something???
Get back to covering real stories and not this old news.
I once had someone break into my car... They went right for the textbooks and my TI-85!
I wouldn't remove it from the car -- I'd use one to the serial port infrared devices to PPP to it. Just mount the matching IR unit in the garage, and connect the power so the player can run with the engine off (maybe with a keychain-based RF switch). Then my home machines can record my favorite news/talk shows and I'll listen to them a few hours later.
So what do you play when driving through Redmond, WA?
Why, the Windows 95 song of course! It's a spoof on another song, and some guy is singing about how his computer won't stop crashing, it costs 5x too much, etc.. (and I came across it 2 years ago!)
I don't have a link for it, nor do I have a high enough bandwidth pipe to post it myself, but search around for "the Windows 95 Song" on mp3 sites..
I think
'Another one bites the dust' by Queen
would an appropriate selection.
What _I_ want is a 10-disc-changer sized box with
;)
;)
no screen, all it does is emulate a disc changer
interface. Plug a laptop into its serial/ether
port to transfer data and configure, but use another serial port with a widget to emulate your
sony/kenwood/factory (mine's mopar/jeep) changer controller head unit.
Drop a couple of 18GB drives onto it, never _ever_
worry about scratching your CDs again!
My Jeep even has a little storage box, meant for a dealer-installed CD changer. I'm a-itchin to have the equivalent of a 500 CD deck.
What's worse?
Having a story repeated a few times?
Or having idiots repeating "How many times will this be repeated?" several hundred times every time a repeat story appears?
We get the point already you hypocrites!!!
Empeg is VERY EXPENSIVE, and this other guy only relases binaries for his carmp3?
THIS STORY SUCKS!!
I did this years ago when I was in the car audio business ... not exactly telnet, but you could call the car and start the engine and shut it back down. Also, if the alarm went off, the car would call you and let you talk to the idiots who were breaking into your car -- or you could keep quiet and shut down the engine while they were trying to drive it away.
It was kind of eerie to be on the shop's cordless phone and start the car out in the parking lot. "Car" isn't quite right -- it was a black GMC Typhoon with *very* dark windows... gave me the creeps because it reminded me of the movie "The Car"... I made sure I didn't cuss at it.
Uh...Hello? Who do you think fabs the StrongARM processor??
And what about the USB I/O? Who do you think invented that?
Are you feeling better now that you know you bought an intel product and just RAVED about it??
Or was that just typical "me too" bashing?
AC Hooligan
Yep, that's because criminals are basically stupid. A friend had their house broken into and someone stole a jacket, a PSX, and the VCR along with some books.. they left the PC, TV, stereo, etc.
AC/DC - Highway to Hell
Why does the 6GB model cost $400 more when the dif between a 2 and 6gb HD is about $50?
Sigh, your obvious market is techies, don't treat us like idiots......
Did you notice that the picture of Slashdot has the wrong tagline?
It says "News for nerds. It matters."
http://www.empeg.com/gfx/slashdot.jpg
From page http://www.empeg.com/main.html
Cheers,
KenB
The "He's a wanker" song that they did for the drunk driving campaign in the UK a year or three ago.
So does that mean you've bitched five times already?
It seems to me AC/DC's "Highway to Hell" is fitting to that Great and Abominable thing there.
Criminals aren't stupid. They steal stuff that they can easily fence. Textbooks are about the easiest things possible to fence in a college town, just wait till book buyback at the end of the semester. Calculators would also likely be easy to fence. A computer would be much harder to get rid of!
This comment contains exactly one lame Beowulf joke.
Yeah! Yeah! And we could replace the windshield with one of those new crystal lattice covered glass pane monitors and overlay Carmageddon on top of it! Sweet! Nothing like pasting pedestrians for REAL! Whoooo hoo! Now all we need are side mounted gatling guns and an urban assault bumper, then we'll be ready for the Y2K riots that will surely ensue.
Its probably smaller than an average hard drive (laptop hd's cost ALOT more than 3.5 hd's). It appears to be marginally more temperature tolerant. But most important to me, is that it DOES appear to absorb enough shock to operate in an average car scenario. I get really tired of the cynics here constantly giving /. and rob a hard time, and talking about how much everything sucks. As best I can tell, most of the posters here aren't nearly as smart as they seem to think and I'm simply not interested in hearing from them. Sure I could stop reading, but unlike most of you, I actually -like- /. You all give mob mentality a bad name, and should be ashamed.
As for this particular article, I think that the device looks worthwhile. As a consummate audiophile, I get the impression it would be a good alternative to the Clarion Auto PC, another device I have seriously considered purchasing. I've spent $4,500.00 on my car stereo so far, and this is the first well thought out car mp3 player I've run across. I only briefly read over the white paper on the device, and I can't say I noticed if it had 4 volt pre-outs, which would be an absolute necessity for me.
-Ryan Taylor
(ryan@schulzemfg.com)
Anyone who thinks this device costs too much should go buy a > $4,000.00 car stereo.
.00 for a device like that.
Like the one I happen to own.
What exactly are the alternatives? The Clarion auto PC? With its $1,200.00 price tag?
Most of the head units I've considered purchasing in the past 6 months have been in the $800.00 + price range. And if this device will do good signal processing (with programs or in hardware), that would mean I wouldn't need a seperate DSP unit. Which would just make my whole month. I'm easy to please. Good sound, no skips, hot DSP, 4 volt pre-outs. I'd pay at least $1,000
Good for me to poop on. The only thing good about PWEI is that they were on the same tour with Nine Inch Nails and Jim Rose Circus.
Does it come with a cute intern?
Do you have some sort of problem with people releasing binary-only software? Wat makes you think you are entitled to everything that someone else works on without any kind of penalty imposed?
Why do people complain about stuff like this, especially when a binary is provided free of charge? Go complain to Corel that WordPerfect 8 isn't OpenSource and isn't GPL. See where that gets you.
You all give mob mentality a bad name, and should be ashamed.
:)
Stolen.
Links to CD devices gathered from the hardware section at mp3.com
http://www.kinetic.org/cd3-hardware.html
http://www.naiam.com/
http://members.xoom.com/Xarvia
There are some dead links listed as well.
The only site with a viable commercial product is the Naiam.com site, but they've had this thing on the drawing board for many months now and its still isn't available.
Thieves are not that stupid, they only take things that can be quickly sold. Seen many PC's in pawnshops.. Nope, they wont touch them, they depreciate too fast. Machine tools, and small items like CD players and video games sell fast.
The eMPEG might not be a real target since it has no cassette slot or CD slot, no-one wants just a radio which is what this thing is going to look like, a cheap radio with only 4 button and a blank display.
On the other hand, in the US, most car policies do not cover aftermarket stereos and CB's or other non-original equipment.
then again what do i know
Plus it has an AC adaptor, so you can load all your CD's onto it once, and throw them away.
This story is probably too dead for anyone to read this, but-
I'd really be interested in seeing some sort of encoding function, so that you could listen to the radio and keep songs. It would probably be a pretty kludgy system with plain old regular radio, since you'd need to manually define song beginnings and endings and name the song manually, but if digital radio (whatever it's called now) takes off, these problems would be solved. As for the sound quality, I don't think it would be noticably worse than FM usually is.
And, if you have favorite radio programs (some people actually do, believe it or not), you could have it spin up and encode it for later listening, like those new timeshifting TV (like Replay TV or TiVo) units are going to let you do.
"Of course once you put a computer (that you can control) in a car you can load the thing with sensors and auto scripts all over the place; heat the screen when needed, that type of thing, hell you could automate the whole car heating system."
That would be pretty cool. I could just see it now:
"Awww man I locked my keys in my car!"
"Well lets go back to the office and telnet in to unlock the doors."
Gotta love technology
a few years back (my first summer after college, now that I think about it) the house that I was living in was burgled... they left a sun workstation, an intel box, and close to US$5k in loose hardware alone. instead they took a baseball cap, a camera, a graphing calculator, some cds, that sort of thing... not to mention a 5 gallon wine jug full of pennies. wish I'd seen the poor schmuck running down the street with that!
Sympathy for the Devil.
Well the toliet went crazy yesterday afternoon.
The plumber he said, "Never flush a tampoon."
This great information cost me half a weeks pay.
And the toliet blew up the very next day ah yay yay ooohooo blew up the next daaaayy!
Lot's more stuff about how corrupt and abusive to customers the 'flakes' are and how "you're so greedy you'll probably join us......."
"Thanks to slashdot users feedback, the font
size has been increased on all pages to help
Unix users of Netscape and IE for Mac read
the site more easily. Hope this helps! "
Pricewatch says diff is $84, not $50 as I originaly guestimated.
If I had such a nasty fetish, I wouldn't be so sanctimonious.
My sister, who is in the peacecorps, was agahst that I spent $40 on a bird feeder. "How can you pay so much to feed birds when children are dying of malnutrition"
If she met someone like you who spent $4500 on a car stereo her head would probably explode.
To add a few details to some of the other posts in this thread, a 2.1 gig Seagate laptop drive can be had for $124, and a 6.4 gig IBM laptop drive runs around $209. Prices from pricewatch.com. I'm sure prices will be even lower by the time the Empeg hits the streets.
Wonder how hard it would be to swap hard drives in this thing?
I hope they are using open hardware, otherwise they are violating the HGPL, and they'll have the Free Hardware Foundation after them.
Who cares if Intel fabs the SA1100 - they didnt DESIGN it - eg not an x86 design dood.
Um no... Humans can survive for a while with air temps around 200F it's just very uncomfortable. Actualy the interior of a car, during the summer, can get up around 70-80C/160-180F with the windows closed. Most plastics used in consumer products can begin to warp at these temps. Also you have to consider that the ambient temp in the car is not the concern main concern for HDDs. The air temp in the car may reach 20C but the HD in the radio may still be below the operational range and could take at least a few minutes to warm up.
Nevermind the fact that cars also tend to be a high humidity environment(unless you live in the desert) and things like condensation and mildew can be problems. It sounds like the Empeg was never designed to be left in the car. If you buy one and want it to last I's going to be tagging along with you wherever you go.
Esp. when played back through expensive speakers like those from Dynaudio and high current amplifiers like those made by HiFonics
Hmm..must have been about the same time you were entering puberty, eh?
Or at least that's what billg must play
on his WinCE box.
Don't worry about a heater, filtering out the spam while it downloads your mail and gets /. updates during the night will keep it warm.
CLICK. VRRRMM.
"Good Morning, Dave. You have fourteen new pieces of mail. Current temperature is twenty-seven degrees, snow starting in southwest suburbs, high of forty degrees. Traffic accident on southbound I-90 at I-94."
When i saw nin+jrssc together, they were with that scheisslich band "Marylin Manson"
ic.
Just tell her it isn't your fscking job to feed those children in a FOREIGN country dying of malnutrition.
Don't forget the mp3stereo mailing list where we discuss such issues as exactly how to go about building something like this.
To subscribe, send mail with subject SUBSCRIBE to mp3stereo-request@itchy.wdc.com.
And no there is currently not an archive of all past articles (waiting on my DSL line).
Thanks, Aaron Newsome
Hardware MP3 Players by CmdrTaco on Monday February 8th 99@09:43
Empeg MP3 Car Stereo Ready for Production by CmdrTaco on Wednesday January 27th 99@08:41
Posted by skitzo:
car-stereo-cum-computer... Are they suggesting something here?? =) -skitz
Checked their site - they've got a little "we love Slashdot" section with an image of what appears to be the Empeg player with "Slashdot: News for Nerds: It Matters" showing on the display.
Kinda cool. Now if I had a car, I'd get one of these things.
"I'd like to make a promise and I'd like to make a vow, that when I've got something to say, sir, I'm gonna say it now
- "We're Not Gonna Take It", by Twisted Sister
- "Crumblin' Down", by John Cougar Mellencamp
- "Dust in the Wind", by Kansas
etc.etc.etc. Endless fun!
"I'd like to make a promise and I'd like to make a vow, that when I've got something to say, sir, I'm gonna say it now
Ok, Redmond-bashing aside; this thing deserves its own anthem. Given that it's Linux-based and a portable source of *many* MP3s, I'd call it:
"Paradise by the Dashboard Light".
"I'd like to make a promise and I'd like to make a vow, that when I've got something to say, sir, I'm gonna say it now
Yeah, when my house got broken into they stole the better stereo stuff, a portable CD player, and jewelry, but dang it! They didn't steal my computer! It would have been less hassle than it was to get Quantex to replace my broken CD drive (this was ~4 years ago.)
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Two words for you: Windows_95_sucks.mp3 :)
"My 3-8-6, ain't got the speed,
gonna havta buy myself a brand new machine,
whoa-o-o-oa..."
Oh man, I love that song.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Oh No! Help Help! He's shooting me with the BFG 9000!
**HONK HONK HOOOONNNNK** SCREEEECH
CRASH!!!!!
Kinda gives a new meaning to "deathmatch."
More importantly, how many times are we going to see THE SAME DAMN CAR MP3 PLAYER FOR LINUX? I think empeg.com has been on Slashdot at least twice before this.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Umm... I hope you mean 90F... 90C (194F) is above the maximum operating temperature for humans, too.
We already covered the basic mobile office...
How about starting it up in the winter?
Un/Locking the doors?
Reporting alarms and current location(via GPS) to the police?
If you've got a general purpose computer in the car, all you need is a cell-phone...
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Yes, this has been on slashdot several times. What new can be discussed now? Larger hard-drives? Faster CPU speeds?
... BEOWOLF! In a traffic jam, your car radio could network with nearby car radios, and create a large computing surface! WooHoo! I can't wait!
Oh wait
:)
Although we have heard about this several times on Slashdot, the particular article that is being referenced to is new, and refers to their presence at LinuxWorld, and possibly has information that was not included in previous offerings. So, instead of thinking of it as a repeat, why not think of it as an update?
Shawn Asmussen
I agree, i'm currently in alaska (and don't plan to move thank you very much) and as i'm typing this the temps are -25F, simply put most LCD based machines would require heaters of some kind. The power requirements wouldn't be much but it would still take a bit for the screen to warm up (you should see a pilot try and display at -45F :)
Of course once you put a computer (that you can control) in a car you can load the thing with sensors and auto scripts all over the place; heat the screen when needed, that type of thing, hell you could automate the whole car heating system
The empeg uses _laptop_ hard disk drives (2.5" form factor). Those 6GB drives are expensive...
-- Nathan
First one on the last week or two to send in something about it. Hasn't there been a half-dozen postings about the Empeg on here in the last six month?
And I thought it was something new...
www.bangsplat.org/autolinux
for anyone interested...
Which makes sense, I've never been able to get RedHat to run on an 8meg system, regardless of what their minimum requirements say.
I use RedHat on my alpha and 8meg+ intel systems, Debian on anything 8 meg or less.
RedHat could learn a bit from Debian in the installer allowing you to mount an existing swap partition first step of the install. In 8 meg, I've found fdisk and the other partitioning program won't load... at least in the two or three I've tried.
...they have a PWEI album in one of their pictures. You know it's good.
'nuff said.
Voice Recognition remote control. There's a neat upgrade.
As for the great white north, how about a computer-controlled car stereo heater?
I don't mind having to warm the thing up before I use it, or taking it out of the car every night, but if I forget it in the car, I don't want to have to buy a new one.
Um, I don't know about you, but when it's cold out, I usually have the heat in my car cranked well above the freezing point. As for theft, it's removable, just like any other removable stereo.
Take it with you! show it off!
How many times do we have to get this same story? I'm wondering how much empeg is paying Rob.
.-.--
For 2 reasons, first, theft, that's obvious.
Second, for all of us living in the Great White North, that device would be operationnal only 6 months/year. (On a warm year)
I emailed the developpers of the empeg when they started building it. The guy told me that the device would only be operational with temperature above 0C.
Still, it would be a great summer toy!
M.
So what do you play when driving through Redmond, WA?
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
"We could be happy if the air was as pure as the beer"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
Duh.
Dave Mathews Band - Crash.
pooptruck
According the the latest Debian Weekly News (http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/) , it uses Debian gnu/linux.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
They even refer to being on slashdot last January on their home page.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
From their site:
"It's pull-out removable, which is handy both for security and because to update the tunes you need to hook it up to your PC."
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Stuck in the Middle with You
or
I Can't Get No Satisfaction
Speaking of the Stones, how come MicroSoft never played the rest of "Start Me Up": "You make a grown man cry".
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
-- ultra1
Correct, we don't have to worry about the min. temp in the winter - but instead it is the max. temp that is important.
The specs for the empeg say 0C to 55C operating from the hard drive. This is approx 32F to 130F - and I have personally seen the air temp. get to 125F here in Phoenix. Expect much higher temps in a car sitting in a sunny parking lot.
Of course, 55C is the max _operating_ temp, which means the empeg should be able to deal with higher temps while turned off. Just don't expect to jump in the car and turn it on.
Well once I get my income tax in my car mp3player is going in! Im using a 6inch LCD from www.eio.com and running caramp from http://ryanspc.com This is a decent player but I wish there were better ones because he hasn't released the source code to it. Anyine know of any cool looking svgalib or ggi mp3player?
Natas
http://www.mp3.com/pedophagia
grab some of our mp3's to listen to, or buy our cd. Industrial music made in Linux!
Natas of
-=Pedophagia=-
http://www.mp3.com/pedophagia
Also Admin of
http://loki.linuxgames.com
I can't remember how many times I've had to dodge morons who were too busy playing with their car phones to watch where they were going. Now what?
"Uh, gee, officer, I'm sorry I was doing 40 over the speed limit on the shoulder. I'm doing a kernel re-compile and it's just driving me nuts..."
Cool... The webpage states that it uses Python extensively. That means that it should be really easy to hack up the software to suit your individual needs. :)
-troy
the sky is falling!
the sky is falling!
oh wait, no - that's just the addiction talking.
if there's anyone at linuxworld right now, can you go find Illiad and get him to update today's UserFriendly?
i haven't got the shakes yet, but i've got a quiz in spanish today, and i need my fix before then!
-- familiarity is only skin deep
Unless the thieves are geeks of some sort -
they would be screwed if they ripped of your stereo.
A bunch of Windoze using idiots (who have recently stolen the Linux-powered MP3 Player):
"When I type 'win', it doesn't do anything... it's broken.... 'dir' doesn't work either... Dammit this sucks..."
---
The statement below is true.
Or perhaps somebody could port Carmageddon...
dude, if you type in the date it's there. it's just not updated on the static page :)
...we could go for several decades without problems. Definitely a very cool product.
Linux: Because rebooting is for adding new hardware.
Why doesn't anyone add a CD-ROM drive to any of these systems??? It could be used several ways:
* The obvious - play exisitng CDs.
* Update the MP3 database with a CDR disc. (I like this option better than dragging the box to my computer to transfer via IR or serial. That has got to be really slow.)
* And better yet, record normals CDs directly into the MP3 database.
Sure I want one, but it should be easy to use.
Has anyone actually had overheating problems on these?? The LA summers are brutal.
Still, none of these put the MP3/CD player in a car stereo format.
Why the link to XXIMP?? Isn't that just a touch screen interface. I couldn't find anything about CDs on it.
As long as we are enhancing the linux/bathroom ;-)
experience, I thought maybe embed this linux
mp3 power into a q-tip? Anyone with me?
I smell a successful startup here.
The Empeg is relatively expensive, but developing a custom mainboard always is; you sure you're up to the task? If you've read some more of the details on the mp3mobile you'll know that some source was released; and copyright issues played a part in the descision not to release more. Finally, I'd better declare an interest; Hugo is my younger brother! :-)
PS No one at Slashdot has stock in Empeg
// Hmm, another variant of IE/W9x/NT to add to the "integrated MS value proposition"
They need to just make a package that rips the CD strait to the unit, also with CDDC (what ever) feature so we don't have to go in and edit the tags.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
Check it out at
http://yulia.com/hardware/