Not wanting to sound pushy but has anyone had any joy with this yet, or not.
It should really be in the wish list for hi-Jack i know.
Just wishing.

I'm not really in the mood to work on it, come to think of it, I'm not really in the mood to do anything at the moment.

I got given a Roberts Gemini 15 DAB radio for xmas and I had a look inside and it's got a little detachable DAB module as well. It's not made by Radioscape however so I still need to go find more info on it.

If I ever where to think about going into production I wondered wether cannibalising a suitable radio might be the way to get round the minimum order quantity problem with the DAB modules.

The Matsui tuner that I bought is down to £49.99 in Dixons now. Haven't opened it up far enough to identify the module yet though.

It isn't a Radioscape module, it is a Frontier Silicon Chorus FS1010-A. To call it a module is a little grand, as it is a single small chip.

http://www.ensigma.com/News/Release/index.asp?ID=21

The Matsui tuner has three separate boards inside it. One with the power and amp, another with the display and a third with the dab module and everything else.

Here is the board with the DAB module on:



There are some more shots of the internals here http://www.norman.cx/photos/default.asp_Q_ST_E_1_A_F_E_20041231

While the Matsui doesn't have a Radioscape module, I can confirm that the portal 1 DAB portable that ASDA are selling for £39 does contain a RS201. The module is even socketed to the main board, making it easily removable.

That could possibly sort out supply of the module, problem is, there's three models of every module they make with differing control options. They are a parallel interface, an i2c interface (what I've got) and a simple interface whereby you connect 5 buttons, a rotary encoder and an LCD directly to the module. I'd imagine they're using the LCD one.

Looks like a trip to ASDA tonight methinks.

That sounds about right, there is very, very little on their own board apart from the LCD, rotary encoder, buttons and amps.

Yeah, quick cheap and easy as there's almost no development required to get them to market. Of course, you could always build one of those modules in thicko LCD mode into a DIN-sized unit along with a small amp and use it in conjunction with the empeg. It'd be dead easy.

The hacky method would be to make a PIC/AVR/whatever pretend to be a LCD. It is probably a HD44780 based interface using the standard charset which means you could grab the details fairly easily and then display them on the empeg VFD.

Interesting idea, like a low-level screen scrape.

Funnily enough my Picaxe dev kit arrived a couple of weeks ago and I've already got an i2c RTC chip working with it. So really all I need now is an aerial and a bit of patience.

Fingers crossed for a quiet December!