Greetings!

What do people here think of the feasibility of modifying or selling a drive cable with a parallel -> serial ATA adapter in line?

I have seen variations of them for sale for desktop drives, bit I am wondering if something like that could be small enough (with a right angle bend) to fit between the main board and the drive tray, yet secure enough to allow use of S-ATA drives in the empeg.

I ask because all of the next generation drives (with the exception of a limited amount of 160GB models) all seem to be S-ATA only. Not that I see lots of people upgrading to 160GB drives yet, but because even larger drives are around the corner. I can easily imagine dual 200GB drives, or perhaps even just a single 200GB drive, with an IDE -> flash card adapter for a boot drive and utilities.

Discuss.

I imagine that an appropriately sized and shaped adapter might be difficult to find off the shelf. Sounds like a decent idea to me.

Maybe it's time for somebody to do a "new" empeg. These days, one could imagine doing things that weren't possible, at the right price anyway, with an in-dash player. I wonder if the Cambridge team have anything to show off...

Maybe Sigmatel (or whoever controls the original empeg software base) could use that to implement a head-unit (OEM or third-party) that speaks to iPods better than any of the existing in-car integration. Give us a decent empeg-style interface with modern iPod interconnectivity. Even better would be if my car magically got on my wireless network and let me sync to it. (Yes, you can cobble this together, but why not have WiFi built-in? If you also have GPS, you've got one hell of a war-driving machine.)

So the nextgen "empegalike" should have:

Headsup display
Wireless networking
Flash card reader
GPS sat nav

Sounds quite good, anything else?

I'd just be happy with a design built around a portable player. Get in the car and dock the portable player fully inside the dash. The DIN sized unit would have a seperate screen/interface for the car that pulls the music, playlists, and position info off the portable player.

Space and price depending, maybe also throw a hard drive inside the dash unit for either standalone use when the portable isn't around, or an expanded music library when the portable is docked. A really cool possibility of this would be to have compressed music on the portable player, but FLAC or higher bitrate compressed music on the built in drive. Dock the portable and it keeps playing, but using the higher quality music on the dash unit.

All a dream of course. The closest I think we will get is seeing someone do this around an iPod. Some of the interfaces are getting close, but not quite fully there.

The hardware all exists today if you're willing to hook it up - which isn't that difficult with some parts. There are even hardware products that integrate a ton of functional hardware into "one box" so to speak. The biggest missing piece of the puzzle? Software.

There's some out there but does it meet the criteria you'd use to decide whether it qualifies as "empeg-like" - don't know. I haven't heard of anything that quite fits the bill in this regard.

The next problem is in trying to integrate such a solution into a car that already has its own system that may overlap considerably with what you're trying to install. Far better in that case would be to integrate with the on-board system, using its input and output devices to control and display/play your content and other middleware. This is difficult mostly because these systems tend to be proprietary, and even if something more simple like control knobs and joysticks can be decoded, figuring out how to take over the CPU, operating system and display are another matter entirely.

But if you ask me what I think the killer product would be, the above lays down the foundation. Installing a "box" that would provide anything else your built-in system didn't have, while allowing you to run either patched built-in software or a brand new interface to control the whole lot. Of course, without interfering with anything else the onb-board-system might do, like control your engine.

Bruno

Yeah. The gumstix is an interesting plaform (we bought some of these to jump-start a project) basically an x-scale and 16MB flash, 64MB SD-RAM and bluetooth on a PCB the size of a stick of gum (or thereabouts, obviously thicker though!).

The gumstix has nice high density hirose connectors to break out the bus, so peripherals could be easily added via a motherboard and other hirose connectors, a motherboard could obviously provide the basic audio, power section, drive connectors etc.

There's enough talent on here to make this happen, but to me a "dummy" headunit which talked iPod and displayed information empeg-esque would be more useful and more desirable, and considerably simpler. (hardware and very little software required)

Adrian

Back on topic, I don't think we'll be able to find an off the shelf part small enough. I've had a bit of a look and most SATA-IDE converters are for 3.5" drives. The separate power connector of 3.5" drives further makes the conversion more bulky.

i.e. something like http://www.addonics.com/products/io/adsaide.asp

Really it's going to have to be a custom design I think. There are single chip solutions, so someone could design a suitable PCB from scratch. I think it would be physically possible. Obviously there would be quite a limited market for something like this so unless someone here does it, it's unlikely to happen. Although I have no need at all for the large drives right now, this sort of thing does interest me and I might invstigate a bit further.

It's certainly ballpark feasible in my opinion but space could be an issue.

I've seen much smaller in-line SATA/IDE bridge adapters. Still with the wrong (40-pin + power) connector, but small enough to tuck inside the player with a major bit of fuss. Perhaps just stuff it into the second drive bay and go with a single SATA drive ..

Or not.

I'd seriously doubt that Apple would come out with a car audio product in the same vein as the empeg. Cutting your new (and exceedingly non-DIN shaped) car dash to pieces to install a DIN stereo is really not very apple in my opinion!

There are products that give a sort-of decent UI to an iPod, including the very high end touchscreen gear from Alpine?/Clarion? (can't remember which it was) - music browsing, info display, etc. That and as it's just a remote to the iPod, users can play their protected AAC tracks too. From what I've seen in the car mags, it's going three ways:

- Cars with built-in HDD ripper systems (20GB in some high end Lexi, it seems - only 7 years late!). Never used one, but it could be done well.
- Cars with high-functionality iPod interfaces (track details, music browsing via embedded car systems). Issues with browsing being a bit slow, but this can be fixed with clever software (see below).
- Aftermarket stuff, which is mostly iPod-based. Functionality rather like the other two but with more garish colours.

Maybe someone needs to do some code for the empeg which controls an iPod (it's just serial & audio) whilst presenting it with the empeg-style UI. The issue of the serial iPod channel being a bit slow could be addressed by caching the database and updating the empeg's view of the iPod contents in the background during music play.

Once that works then you could move the code over to a new platform (say, more car stereo like with a built in amp & tuner) and sell it. You could even emulate playback features that aren't iPodesque by doing some behind the scenes work to implement "next track from same artist" (etc) by basically only telling the iPod to play one track at a time and managing the playlist yourself.

Pro: it'd be cheap (and hence might sell), and tick the boxes for most mainstream users
Con: not an empeg as people know it

Another option, which I've suggested to Patrick more than once before now, is to do an Xscale-based empeg replacement main board, plus enough kernel hackery to run the same player code. Much faster ATA (maybe even SATA bridges on board), 100mbit ethernet, etc. If it's the same case, then the user has the moral right (IMO, but I'm not a lawyer) to run the original code. Maybe even make the main board accept a Gumstix module, which means you might be able to get away without needing BGA on it - cheaper to make (it's hard to buy the bits for a gumstix for the price they sell them for!).

Pro: you get an empeg with the things that people most wanted fixed, fixed (bigger cap drives, faster connectivity, more memory
Con: a bit hacky

Hugo