I don't think there's much point discussing hardware modifications to the player at this stage. The design is now fixed and we have no plans to produce another version of the player (beyond Mk.2) for some time. The idea behind the Mark 2 is that it has everything fixed to make production easy, and all the hardware features are in place to support a lot of software expansion.

Almost all of the devices that people want to plug into their empeg whilst in-car are relatively low bandwidth. Given that we have a fairly fast docked serial port (including flow control on the Mark 2) I would suggest that the best way to support multiple devices would be to split that out into a number of slower serial ports.

This would require some hardware in the dash with a processor fast enough to run a few software UARTS (a fast PIC should do the job) and a device driver on the player to present a number of virtual ports.

Even allowing for protocol overhead it should be possible to run, say, eight ports up to 9600. That would cover GPS, stalk control, cellular data, CD changer and a bunch of other stuff as well. It should be possible to implement in such a way that individual projects can use it transparantly.

What do you think?

Rob

(I'm not suggesting this as a project for empeg, by the way, we're a bit busy right now!)