...Stay tuned. I'm working out details right now. When I get it all done, I'll post here and in the For Sale board..

Me.

did anyone check these guys out? Sorry if it's already been discussed...

The more I look... they probably don't have anything you guys can use... a lot of nice serial lcd's though... sorry

They're nice displays if you just want display a small-ish amount of text (in fact before I got my Empeg I built my own player using one of their displays).. Maybe okay to augment the Empeg display, but certainly not good for replacing it. The VFDs foxtrot, Hugo, etc and I are using are graphic bitmap modules that can display just like the Empeg.

Greetings!

Actually, I believe these are the ones that he is planning to use with the kits he is developing.

They're not the same. He's using a Noritake Itron one which is the same manufacturer as the VFD in the Empeg itself. The main differences are that the VFD is different size and has a TTL level RS232 interface.
The CrystalFont ones are from somebody else from what I can tell. They've also got the TTL -> RS232 level conversion circuitry built in.

Oh. I was unclear in my post. I know that they are using the Noritake version in the projects.

in fact before I got my Empeg I built my own player using one of their displays

Cool... Me too, I had some dos application (can't remember what it was called) with a 30 gig HD and an advantech biscuit pc board mounted on the HD. It was kind of a cool setup except for the junky number pad I had to use to operate it. But it did work well....

Speaking of which, I am still awaiting a prototype from the PCB manufacturer (make sure they got my files right and all the holes are in the right spot, then I'll go ahead and order a whole slew of them. So, I'm thinking in about 2 weeks I'll be ready to take and ship orders.

Those LCD ones aren't bad displays, I do like the fact that they have different backlighting available. (Their web pages suck, tho, as the "order process" would work for me, couldn't get any prices..)

Me..

I had some dos application (can't remember what it was called)

mpxplay? I used it on one of my early carputers.

mpxplay?

Thats the beast... and hey... it supports ogg

Mike, I definately want of those assembled boards when you get them all straightened out! I did put my name on the list... did you ever decide firmly on which vcd module you would use? Is it going to be the same one in the pic or something else?

I used it also.
http://www.spmicro.com/mp3sidekick/

Cool... this was mine

Wow that's small. And it looks like your actually made it into a car. Mine never had the chance before I got the Neo 35.

It did, and worked well... til the neo35.. I had issues with the clunky number pad, it worked well but I'm a stickler on appearance

This was mine.. Old Powerbook 5300, hacked up Gravis gamepad for key input, CrystalFontz display, Maxim power regulator (now part of my remote empeg board), and I wrote the software (eew.. pre-Carbon/Cocoa programming). Playlists, ID3 tags, shuffling, sort of editing the play queue on the fly, the whole deal. Then I put it in my (almost new at the time) Miata, and a couple months later got an Empeg and ripped it all out (Then last month I ripped all that out and put it in the trunk for my trunk install insanity).

Wow... thats kind of cool! very impressive.... those were the days

I lost my pics when my webserver went belly-up about a year ago. I had an Advantech SBC with onboard LCD controller hooked into a 8.4" TFT, slot-loading laptop DVD drive, DC-DC power supply....etc... I had it all running and ready to install in the car when the fire sale happened on the Empegs. I sold it off in pieces after I got my empeg. While it was far more powerful and flexible hardware-wise, there was nothing software-wise to come close to the empeg. Plus updating it would have been a pain.

yeah... empeg definately is easier to use. Mine wasn't too bad it was small enough to unplug and take inside... I actually had it dual boot dos/win98 with an autoexec that just auto loaded dos after 3 seconds if I didn't press a key. So I'd just haul it inside boot up 98 and pull the stuff off the network. I was using an advantech board too.

In theory you could write an ARM emulator and run the empeg software on top of that... It's not impossible and since the hardware is accessed through the drivers you could even make it work with other hardware.

I sold it off in pieces after I got my empeg.

I sold mine as a complete system running Win98 and then it came back to me a few months later after the onboard NIC died. Its been sitting on top of the (former) router in my office since then.

http://www.robricc.com/misc_images/mp3sidekick.jpg

In theory you could write an ARM emulator and run the empeg software on top of that... It's not impossible and since the hardware is accessed through the drivers you could even make it work with other hardware.

That would be naughty and you should not be even thinking it.

Hey. I never said I was going to do it!

It is funny how many of us almost had something working before we bought our empegs. I had a PowerMac 6100 set up with some elaborate AppleScripts for voice recognition and a keypad for basic control that I never quite finished because I didn't want to spring for a DC-DC power supply and some sort of keypad when I broke down and bought a MP Shuttle which served me in a more or less acceptable fashion until my number came up for an empeg.

Oh, and I love this quote from Rob in that thread...

In reply to:

---

I don't think it'll take much longer before people work out that a minidisc player is much better value than a solid-state MP3 walkman, and then technology will progress.

---

I don't think that ended up quite the way he thought

-Mike

Off topic here, but mentioning the Mini Disc player reminded me of this. Mini Disc players haven't quite died off, yet.

I was thinking the exact same thing about an ARM emulator the other day- naughty as that would be. It would be fun to get a Mini-ITX box and make it a "virtual" Empeg..

It's not viable anyway. There is a lot of emulate and it'll be very hard to do. The DSP does a lot of stuff and there isn't any documentation on the internals apart from write blah to blah and this happens.

QEMU seems to be able to emulate ARM on a x86. You'd still be looking at emulating the display, IR, slave USB (at least enough to get the player to think it exists), DSP and Hijack. DSP probably wouldn't be too tough since you wouldn't actually emulate it- you would just make the player think it's there and pass along the sound to the host system. Display and IR would be no real problem- that would be the fun part. The Kernel mods and stuff could get hairy hmm...

You wouldn't be able to get the tuner working as part of the decoding is done in the DSP itself. Also the equaliser won't work because that's done by programming the DSP as well.
It'd run but a lot of the features won't work and you might as well use the rioplay client by then

In reply to:

---

Speaking of which, I am still awaiting a prototype from the PCB manufacturer (make sure they got my files right and all the holes are in the right spot, then I'll go ahead and order a whole slew of them. So, I'm thinking in about 2 weeks I'll be ready to take and ship orders.

---

Any news Mr Foxtrot ?

I have a VFD for sale in the for sale section if anyone is interested.