FS: NewFace Brushed Aluminium Fascia with clear buttons

Hi folks, I'm selling my aluminium NewFace fascia. It has a light scratch which I've highlighted in some of the photos.

See here for more details:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=130219862436

Thanks.

I really want this. Will you ship to the US?

Hi there,

I've just answered a similar question on the auction. I will ship to the US but need to get a quote for the postage first.

I'll also have to adjust the auction settings to allow international bidding.

Keep an eye on the aurction and I should get these issues dealt with in the next few days.

Regards,

Euan.

Ok, you should now be able to bid from abroad. Let me know if this is not the case.

Regards,

Euan.

There.. I've put a nice, beefy bid onto it to get things going.
Here's hoping you get good value from the auction!

Cheers

wow! nice winning bid!

Yes, I will soon have a nice replacement NewFace.

you beat me out at the last 5secs!!

Does anyone have one they would part with? I would pay the same price.

I would even pay a borrowing fee to borrow someones NewFace for reproduction. I happen to work at an Aluminum manufacturer and could easily get this done.

If nobody will sell or let me borrow one, then I guess its to the drawing board. That just takes alot more time and effort and work is busy.

If anyone can help let me know. I've been wanting to get the ball rolling on this for awhile.

i was going to bid on this also but did not since it was only a facia.. if it where a facia AND handle it would be someting else

Where are you located? I would be willing to load mine for a small discount on a few more new ones. Well once I get it

I really hope you can source one and break the curse. I've been waiting ~5 years to get one of these, shortly after 303 stopped making them. As you're probably aware a few have taken up the torch to get some manufactured but haven't produced anything beyond the prototype stage.

Congrats on the win, Attack! I gave up a bit over the $200 USD level.

When I bought my Empeg, it came with two of these NewFace fascias, the recently-auctioned aluminium one and a black one.

I have the original fascia as well and will likely put the black one up on eBay shortly once I get the chance to photograph it.

I'll keep you guys posted!

Sent you a PM

Thanks!

Please let me posted and PM me if you put one on ebay I've been waiting for one of these for years as well

has any got any luck with reproduction?

Quite a ways back, I was very close to putting out a new aluminum fascia which would take the original buttons (and Greenlight's buttons, of course), but after I had put nearly two thousand dollars into the project, producing prototypes and trying different approaches such as laser and water cutting, someone else came up saying they were gonna produce some too. I decided it wasn't worth the expense to continue working on the project, seeing as the potential market wouldn't (in my opinion) support multiple manufacturers, so I scrapped it. I can only speak for myself, but I think it'll be hard to get anyone to produce them again unless there's some sort of guarantee that they won't have to spend thousands of dollars to, in the end, be just one of the people trying to market to a very small audience.

Someone in the Bay Area should get a membership to TechShop and crank some out.

They have a CNC machine, powder-coating machine, anodizing machine, etc.

The one near me is not open yet.

damn...

the problem is then to feed the CNC with info on how to cut/drill..

maybe it should even be possible to make an excat copy of the org. mk2a facia + handle ?

btw... never listen to people saying that they wan't to produce it too, not before they can put one in our hands

I can understand that, Boelle, but you still have to consider, the production of something like the aluminum fascia for someone like me (i.e., I don't have all the equipment, etc.) is a pretty big investment of time and, more importantly, money. I'm not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. My partner (on the project) and I discussed continuing the project when the other person's plans were announced, ad we decided that we couldn't risk spending any more money on it in light of the risk of only selling a few.

Who knows, maybe someday.

But the other person's plans fizzled. Could yours be brought back to life? Could your progress be sold to someone else to continue it?

Hm, I guess there's kind of a curse on the NewFace. 303 made it than vanished. speedy bought the design and was going to make it, than vanished. webroach, don't vanish on us!!

I'm always so tempted to try another one of these money-hole projects. But if I do another one, it will be replacement stock handles. Not glamorous, but necessary.

well, since i got my empeg i have always wondered who had the rights to put them back in production?

is there is not a market for the empeg anymore?

well this was just another brain fart from me

Too small of a market -- many (most?) new cars have dashboards that make it really difficult to replace the factory head units.

People can (and do) still manage it just fine, but it's too much fuss for most, especially when one can just plug their iPod into a supplied socket on the factory stereo.

Cheers

but who has the rights to produce the unit? and is there a time limit after (if the unit is not put in production) which they loose these rights?

i guess that most of the pcb layouts etc. is still around so that small scale production could be done...of course some parts are not around any more...

There's enough of them for sale at any point in time, that I really doubt it would be worthwhile for anyone to build new ones.

We just keep trading the existing 4000 (?) units amongst ourselves over time, like a game of musical chairs. Whoever has the most at the end, wins.

well just for the fun, does any have the pcb layout and parts list for the mk2a?

I'm guessing that Patrick probably still has pcb layout and parts list, but couldn't release them without permission from Sigmatel who, as far as I know, owns the intellectual rights to them.

Also, I'm certain that if another run were going to be made, they'd want to address some of the shortcomings, like 100mb or gigabit ethernet, USB 2.0 master, sata hard drives, more memory and faster processor, video output, etc..

You can see where it would quickly get prohibitively expensive. I'd be much more interested in Sigmatel open sourcing the player software so it could be ported to work on standard pc hardware.

The licensing for the software is complicated. From what I can gather, the IP has been split up and its all kinda hazy about where and who exactly owns what. Basically, not going to happen anytime soon. The code is still used as well I believe.

damn, could be fun to try what the price for the pcb with parts would be today

i think the only way to do another run, and to keep it alive would be to make both the hardware and software "opensource" so that every one could join development.. just another crazy idea

A lot of the parts used were hard to find even when the empeg was in full production. After this many years it'll be nearly impossible to find large quantities of them.

The empeg software going open source just isn't going to ever happen.

it could still be fun to try, i just found a pcb drawing tool (http://www.sunstone.com/pcb-resources/Downloads.aspx) that can import a lot of formats and can tell what the final price would be

only thing needed is a pcb layout and parts list to start from, if sunstone can not find some of the parts then it would just be a matter of finding a part that can be used instead

and i guess that just just changeing ethernet and such would mean that it is a whole new pcb layout and as such no one can claim right for it anymore

the hard part is the software, i guess that everything would have to done from scratch... but maybe some "guru"'s from here could do that?

Someone did start writing a replacement player, but I don't recall if it was ever opensourced. It didn't really get very far, and, as best I could tell, its introduction to the add-on software pool met a very lukewarm response. There are a limited number of gurus on this board who are capable of rewriting the player app from scratch, and most (if not all) of them have shown absolutely no inclination in doing so when the topic has come up in the past. This is one of those itches that, if you want it scratched, you're going to have to scratch it yourself.

Cheers,

yeah.... i think the idea is going the pile of "never know when going to start/end" projects

That player software is called "Squash".

http://empegbbs.com/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/206260/fpart/1

well, how many parts can have gone out of the market?

of course it's a big work to put the player (with upgraded hardware) back in production, but at least we could make the pcb and schmatics, which does not cost a single penny if we use the tool i provided more early in this thread

again the hardest part must be construct the player software, but with all be guru's in here i dont think it's a problem, rather a matter of the time they have to do it

just my 0.02 $

Probably lots of them.


But why would any of us here want to do that ? I can think of only two reasons, one to sell to other people and two so that we had more players ourselves.

Empeg/Rio pretty much demonstrated that there isn't a big market for an expensive in car mp3 player. If you did another small production run of the empeg then you'd end up with an even more expensive product that the original empeg. So that is a non-starter.

As to the second reason, I'm a fairly sure that most if not all of us here have as many empegs as we need and if you want another one you only really have to wait a month for a very affordable one to appear on ebay or here. So why would any of us want to spend money on the most expensive empegs ever ?

I think you hugely underestimate the amount of effort that would be involved to recreate the player software with anything approaching the quality, reliability, performance and functionality of the existing empeg player software.

It is a real shame the player code wasn't open source or at least extensible, but it isn't. No one here is going to invest the many man years that would be involved to create a new player for the empeg that matched the existing one on the qualities I listed above. It would be different if the existing software wasn't very good, but it is excellent.

Sure the existing player could be improved on, but that would involve massive effort just to get to the point we are at now with the existing player, before you could start making those improvements. You could of course skip some of the existing player code. I don't have much use for the visualizations, I don't use the EQ, rear speakers, Wave files, Wendy filters and an bunch of other stuff. But then lots of other people do want and use those features, so if you wanted lots of people to use and test it for you you'd have to implement them all.

I'm not at all sure that is true you know. A lot of work by very experienced people (Patrick and Hugo) went into laying out the empeg boards.

Just throwing the schematics (even if you could get access to them) at an automatic tool isn't going to get the quality product that the empeg is.

the tool for creating the pcb/schmatics do a display of the price for the "ready to build in case" pcb, at least that is what i understand, and if we had a part or maybe the whole of the org. pcb designing an upgraded pcb would not be a big problem, the only problem i can se would be the time to do it

as for the software i AGREE, it's a big damn shame that it is not opensource, a lot of improvements could have been done, all of the nice work mark have done with hijack could have been a part of the player software so that we only had to load the player software, one way to create a new player software could be to reverse the org. player and merge it with hijack (if that at all can be done?) the new software will no longer look like the org. player and hence no one can claim rights on it...

if i had the skills i would have started on this a long time ago, but i'm a "monkey" at both programming and designing a pcb, the only thing i'm good at is repairing and put things together by an instruction/guide, also i have a tons of ideas that demands more than normal willing to do them

Just because you can feed a schematic into a PCB routing package doesn't mean what you get out will be any good. For one thing the auto routing is usually terrible and you'll have a massive PCB with a billion vias everywhere. Another problem is that the empeg bus combines digital signals, analog signals and power supplies all into one board.

As I said previously, quite a few of the parts are very hard to find and discontinued. The CPU and DSP are two that have been discontinued years ago now.

If you're going to have to replace them with something else then you'd want new faster/better parts. If you're doing such a major redesign anyway then you might as well start from scratch.


You can already make a single upgrade file that combines the player software with Mark's kernel. Its been like that since the empeg first came out. It is just redistributing the resulting package that has issues.


No. Merging a userland program into the kernel would just be nasty and also incredibly hard. Reverse engineering the player is possible but you might as well reimplement it from scratch to save time and also not have any potential legal issues.


Doesn't work like that.

well.. i just feel it's damn shame the empeg went out of production, love it and very happy to have mine going well

just need to have the handle reapired and adding a fan and the light kit

Indeed, but as I said above there isn't exactly a short supply of the ones that were made. If there were then people would be paying more than a couple of hundred quid for them when the come up for sale.

That is really cool, shame there's nothing like that in the UK. I'd be in there every evening and weekend!

They're franchising. Find a rich geek and get him interested.

The only rich geeks I know don't live in the UK.

A collective of moderately wealthy geeks?

I think it's a really smart idea, something I'd actually like to be a part of, if I had the money I'd probably give it a shot. Although I'd imagine the first one would have to be in London.

Ditto