USB Storage

I think it'd be pretty cool if we could hook up a USB storage device to the usb port on the back of the Riocar. Don't mind if it needs to be specially formatted, but it'd rule to be able to expand your storage capacity in such a way.

Very unlikely to happen -- the USB port on the car player is slave-only.

You'd need one of those half-arsed USB crossovers, and I don't know if they work that way round, anyway.

Also, the player isn't particularly well set up for removable storage.

Unfortunately, the usb port on the empeg is a slave port. It has to connect to a computer to work.

Edit: Doh. You beat me to it roger.

In addition, removable storage certainly isn't well set up for road use.

Yeah, this would be very handy for road trips with the digital camera. I currently end up lugging along the notebook computer, which is a cryin' shame since the Empeg is already in the Subaru, and has way more drive space than the notebook.

I suppose I might rig up an ethernet-to-USB bridge for it someday, unless someone knows of one that already exists (?).

Or maybe I'll just poke the tail of the IDE drive cable out through the case, so I can plug the compactflash directly to it (with a cable adaptor).

-ml

And there are plenty of USB external drive enclosures that use 2.5" drives...

...the Empeg is already in the Subaru...

Now that's what I'm talkin' about!

See, I knew Mark was cool.

Hmmm... seems to be alot of sube owners around here... What's up with that...?

Yup, I'm a scooby driver too.

Cheers

Paul

w00t w00t, it's all about the scoobies.

on topic: yes it would be nicer if the usb wasn't a slave device only, but that's the way it is.

eli

There are just a lot of Scooby owners who are techy types (it seems)
At the SIDC track days at Knockhill there is a high percentage of Unix/Network/Sysadmins driving P1's, turbos, WRX's etc.
Last I looked, out of a typical 20 cars there, 2 of us had Empegs (and amplifiers which glow blue in the dark to match), but everyone there had some gadgets.

Perhaps folk who drive 'driving' cars are gadget boys (tm).

Hmmm... corrolation study required...

I am currently peeing my pants as my new WRX gets delivered next week...

Dremmel Status: Standby.

We need a mini subbie club here!

As a side idea , I just happened to use a digital camera by olympus. Maybe that's the way other digital cameras work, but I was quite impressed by the fact that by just plugging it to the USB port of a Win2k system, it would show up immediately as a removable disk (exactly like a zip disk) and allow you to drag out the pictures taken. It got its drive letter and appeared in "My Computer" without doing anything else except plugging it. Notice: no driver installation nor software of any other sort. Basically, the thing seemed to be using the generic removable drivers included in Win2K. Now, wouldn't it be nice if the Empeg could do the same thing when operating as a file taxi unit? Since you guys are going to eventually implement this, I think that is a very efficient and clean way to do it. Now, I don't know how this would be implemented in the empeg itself in terms of partitions or dirs or soup views or whatever, but what I am suggesting here is that while in Emplode one could have a complete control orver the unit, the simple "removable unit" approach could make the file taxi function itself absolutely cool! What do you think?

Hi.

The problem is that the empeg/riocar does not use a FAT filesystem like most digital cameras (and other USB removable media) are using. So we would have to add a FAT<->ext2 translation module as well, because Windows accesses USB storage as raw discs (and I think Linux does so, too). The filesystem on the empeg would not be readable by Windows or MacOS without such a translation layer.
One thing might still work: Use a file on the empeg as a taxi storage, mapping raw disc access (via USB) to raw file access (on the empeg's disc). But that won't be just as nice, because you could not access your MP3s that way.
Possible workaround: Wipe your empeg music partition clean, compile a kernel with (V)FAT support, and format the music partition as (V)FAT. The empeg-side USB implementation would still need to unmount the music partition before writing to it, I guess.

cu,
sven