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Do it yourself MP3 Stereo
ckotso writes "There's this guy who has created a
hi-fi-like MP3 player using an old PC case, an LCD
screen+a few keys attached to the case, a P100 and a
small HD booting linux. MP3s are read from a cd-rom,
which means 12 hours of continous music at home. I guess
it still needs work, but it seems quite good already. Now
I know what to do with that old spare midi tower."
*please send all flames to /dev/null. This device references M$, viewer discretion is advised*
How about grabbing a DOS based MP3 player, load MSCDEX in the autoexec, write a small program (started by the autoexec) to run your interface (input is from stdin remember? send data to LPT1 for the display. Cinch) and parse the CD to see if it is MP3 or *gasp* CDDA, or even MOD,S3M,it, etc. (if your into old school tunes) and go from there? We could squeeze the whole thing into a 1 meg boot EEPROM, with less boot time, and maybe just a little less memory needed? Linux kicks tail, but DOS could have a bit better use in small non-multitasking appliances like this one.
I've done something similar, but I use my PalmPilot (via a serial link to the Linux box) to act as the controller. The principle is that most of the time you're not changing what's playing, so it's not too much of a pain to use the Pilot as needed. Right now I just have stop/pause/skip, etc, and it plays the whole disk randomly otherwise. However, I plan to add the ability to select albums (each dir can be an album for instance).
I brought this to a party and connected it to a stereo and we had music for the whole night off 1 CD...it truely is cool.
I have a similiar project here
Digital optical outputs, and can play from just about any medium. There are actually a lot of these projects around the web.
How much would someone pay for one of these? I can make aluminum cases like this one (mind you JUST the case) for about $225. (lots of labor involved) but I don't think people would pay that.
I've got a friend here with a similar project in the works. Linux on a 1.2 gig scsi hd with a floppy & cdrom plus an lcd. He's making it specifically for the car so he's getting the case custom made (out of clear plexiglass - iMac envy I think). A lot of the stuff is from shows so it's all pretty cheap.
As far as the linux boot speed issue raised above, our solution is to custom compile a kernel with only basic services and network (he's planning on an ethernet hookup to transfer mp3's) and mount the disk read only. I expect it'll come up pretty quick, and with the disk as RO, you can shut it off hard without any waiting for the OS to shut down nice.
That's the plan anyway. I'll have to see if I can talk him into making plans available once the final scematics are drawn up...
I'm doing the same thing, with more emphasis on look. If I'm going to spend $100 on an LCD, the machine must look spiffy. Heck, the LCD I bought ($120) cost more than the machine I'm using (including graphics card, network card, processor, power supply, shell, and memory). So, my plan is to juice up an old 70's 8-trak/Hifi shell by putting a pentium w/a large hard drive inside of it. My biggest problem now is that I have over 200 CD's and it's hard to keep them all in one place when I'm listening to them in the car, at work, at home, and in the gym. Storing them all on one machine would solve that.
I'm using a small keypad interface to the LCD, and I'm going to have three modes of selecting MP3's : Random mode, Scroll-to-Select mode, and a search mode that will act like one of those telephone answering systems where you search for someone's extension by entering the corresponding digits of their last name. I should be well on my way after this weekend - I have most of the code written in Perl. I used the POSIX module instead of the C code that came along with the LCD that everyone seems to be using.
The biggest challenge I see is finding the perfect 70's Hifi/8 trak shell for this machine - look is very important (I'll be using this thing at parties) and I want a non-computer user to be able to use it easily. My objective is to create the most powerful 8-trak machine in the universe. No one else will be able to play 200 CD's worth of MP3 off of their 8-trak. The geek factor of this is great too - I'll be able to telnet to my stereo!