New Approach to adding USB Master

There's been much talk of the uses of a usb master port on the empeg, and just about as many ideas for ways to solve the problem.

The other day Mike Comb asked for a bluetooth bridge to allow him to use his KVM connected peripherals on his laptop, and I pointed him towards the keyspan usb server which wasn't what he was asking for, but solved his problem. Then it occured to me that this is the exact hardware we need to add USB support to our empegs. Ever wanted to dump CF or SD cards to your empeg? Ever wanted your empeg to have bluetooth so it could pop up the name of whover was calling your cell phone on the screen? Ever wanted to load your flash based mp3 player with tunes directly from your empeg?

The only piece missing is linux support for the usb server. Keyspan seems to be interested in adding linux support. Perhaps I'll email and ask how it's coming along. If they were convinced to open source a theoretical linux driver, how hard would it be to port to the empeg?

Matthew

Bluez (Linux bluetooth driver) works with many BT-Serial devices, but it does not work with the 2.2 kernel. This is probably a hurdle unless mlord gets a new distro working with an upgraded kernel. I doubt they would write a driver to work with 2.2, especially since they might be able to use pieces of Bluez.

This device seems very promising for PDA->Empeg BT connectivity (this was found by kendrick) since it does not require any drivers, it emulates a serial port. I probably will investigate using this for Palm->Empeg connectivity sometime in the near future.

In case it wasn't clear the device Mattew linked to has nothing to do with bluetooth. Its basically a USB to ethernet bridge. It connects to USB slave devices (USB hard drives, printers, etc) and exports them over ethernet. A piece of software then runs on one or more computers connected to the network which implements a USB hub in software. Any devices plugged into the keyspan then show up to the computer as plugged into the virtual USB hub. So you could take one of these USB servers and plug it into the empeg on the ethernet port and have access to virtually any USB device (USB hard drives and USB bluetooth dongles being obvious examples) and access them from the empeg. It is a neat idea, if we had the software to do it.

-Mike

Or more to the point, it could perhaps be used to export a Mk1 unit over ethernet.. (which the mk1 lacks).. but not the best of setups.

Quote:
Or more to the point, it could perhaps be used to export a Mk1 unit over ethernet

Well, yes, maybe, but that certainly isn't what I would use one for. Are there really people out there willing to spend a hundred bucks to network enable a mk1? It wouldn't be any faster than USB and the money seems like it would be better spent as a (partial) payment on a mk2.

Anyway, to me the better use would be as a peripheral bus. If you buried one of these boxes in your dash you could have more than 2 hard drives, a GPS connection, bluetooth, wifi, extra serial ports, OBD2 interface, etc. all hooked up to the empeg at the same time using off the shelf hardware and existing linux drivers.

-Mike