Would something like this allow a newer SATA laptop drive to be fitted to an empeg?
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.5458
Hmm- it says "IDE", but I'm not savvy enough to tell for sure what that means. Most likely it means 3.5" drive interface, yes?
In that case, would this help?
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.727

Just wondering...

Yea, the combination of those two could be used.

Except there's not enough space to actually mount them to the mainboard, so some sort of pin adapter would also be needed to attach them to the end of a 44-conductor IDE cable in one of the two drive tray positions.

Yes it would except there isn't nearly enough space unfortunately.

You'll need a SATA cable also - likely a desktop SATA to laptop SATA if such a thing exists (I assume the laptop SATA drives have smaller connectors).

And a power adapter somehow to take +5V from the empeg drive connector and connect to the drive's power connector

Plugs and sockets everywhere All technically possible though. Could almost be a project if the bridge chips are available readily.

Nope. Same connectors, same configuration.

OK thanks. Even the power connector? Still a nightmare connector and adapter wise inside an empeg box.

Assuming the bridge chips are easy enough to get hold of, a small PCB could be designed to plug directly in to the empeg header and have a short power and short SATA cable to the drive (maybe limited to a single drive). The connectors sticking out from the drive would probably cause the most problems since they'd probably hit the display board and I've never seen a right angle SATA connector...

NB: All of this was thought of without even looking at an empeg or measuring anything.

Yes, exactly the same.

And the cabling etc is not very bulky. All of this stuff should fit into one side of the existing drive tray, leaving the other side for a single SATA drive to be installed (500GB is the current max available).

I'll see if I have the right combination of connectors on hand here to try it, and post a photo if I do.

EDIT: the sata-to-pata adapter I have here is designed to plug direclty into the back of a sata drive, so it cannot be used with a sata data/power cable. This sounds good, but it also makes it stick out a bit much for placing into an unmodified empeg drive tray.

If I were to fab a custom tray, or just cut out an existing one, then it would fit fine.

Cheers

Or Googling anything, by the sound of it.

Peter

Those guys win for worst designed shopping site in the websphere. Not that it matters, since they also only seem to know about a single country on the planet.

Cheers

I found these with Google
http://www.advantech.com/products/IDE-(44-pin)-to-SATA-Converter-Module/mod_1-2QFA1K.aspx
http://www.advantech.eu/products/SATA-to-IDE-(44-pin)-Converter-Module/mod_1-2QF48V.aspx
http://www.cooldrives.com/2sahadrtoide.html

I can't remember the amount of space available in the empeg but one of them might work without needed to change anything.

Wow- that last one looks very compact. Only $20!

Yeah, looks perfect for the subset of empeg users resident in one of the hundreds of countries on the planet!

Cheers

Heh.. so who down there will be the first to exhibit a terabyte equipped car player?

Mmm.. probably *requires* at least 32MB of RAM, maybe 48MB or 64MB.. (just to hold the necessary filesystem data structures).

Cheers

What, are you saying I can't use the pair of 1.5TB drives I just got from newegg? You want me to split up my mp3 collection?

Hmm, I don't have a empeg with extra memory or a need for a massive drive hooked up to my empeg. If you figure the adapter takes a drive bay, we need one more generation of laptop drives to get us above the 500GB two 250's will get us now. And frankly, I don't think anyone (even Paul) needs more than 500GB).

I'll have to revisit the threads where the RAM limitations are discussed.
Just curious what the maximum drive size (with, say, 'average' mp3 rips) could be with the standard compliment of MkIIa RAM.

I'm sure one of us would be happy to forward one along.

Hmmm. How hard would it be to take a nice fast ARM running the latest 2.6, and add empeg-compatible /dev nodes so that you could run the classic sw on it but with vastly increased performance and memory?

Hugo

Yeah, I keep thinking about that. Problem is, the device driver model and interfaces are vastly different in the 2.6.xx kernel, so it could end up needing a pile of effort.

Then again, most of your drivers are simple "roll your own" character drivers, which ought to port forward rather easily.

Something for a rainy day, or maybe for some new keener (Jon?) to tackle!

-ml

iEmpeg ?

Sadly, the answer is still the same as all the other times this has come up: not hard at all, because that isn't the hard bit. The hard bit would be persuading the owners of the player code copyright (Freescale) and of the Empeg trademark (D&M) not to get funny about it.

Peter

Pardon my frankly non-existent knowledge of intellectual property and copyright law. But if someone develops the hardware for a generic ARM based linux board which they then sell. Then someone writes the relevant kernel drivers for the /dev nodes and open sources them. So all someone does is buy this board, download and compile the kernel modules and then downloads the 'freely available' player images and extracts the player binary and relevant support files. What's the problem?

Could the serial number chip from our empeg be removed and place it in this theoretical Empeg? Then only allow it to run when it finds a valid serial number? This might help prevent the copyright owners from getting mad.

The problem is those quote marks -- the player code is copyrighted, which means that any copying or publishing of it, including putting it on a website, downloading it from a website, or copying it onto a device, can only be done by the copyright holder or by someone acting with the copyright holder's explicit permission. It's within the copyright holder's rights to restrict those activities to those necessary to use the software only with original car-player units.

In the US at least, they might also have a case that work, such as kernel work, done specifically to enable the use of copied car-player code, counted as contributory infringement.

These laws are dumb (in the sense that even those passed after copyrighted abandonware was recognisably a problem, do not attempt to solve it) but they do exist. And as such an endeavour would doubtless be carried on with extremely limited funds, there probably wouldn't be the money to defend a lawsuit, however bogus it actually was.


The serial number's in the flash chip, I think, but one trouble with that idea is that there's no way to tell "valid" serial numbers from made-up ones.

Peter

If it was a pretty non-commercial effort (eg, someone making new boards that bolt into an existing empeg chassis but with, say, SATA, gigabit ethernet, etc) I seriously doubt anyone is going to notice/be bothered. There's no money in chasing it.

If, on the other hand, you were trying to sell a new product based on code which you didn't have the rights for or source to, then that'd be different....

Obvously, I am not a lawyer, this is just my personal opinion

Maybe an OMAP3530 (the variant with 256MB stacked DDR?), a little FPGA to hook it up to PATA and ethernet & probably the display too as chips these days don't have the greyscale LCD controllers that they used to have... looks like it has a decent external bus interface that could be used to hook high bandwidth stuff up to. You could even have the HDD as an option and just use SD cards as main storage.

Hugo

As long as only one drive is being installed, it's an easy matter to install it sideways with only the need to drill a couple more holes in the tray.

The original cable can be refolded like so.

I bought the :

http://www.cooldrives.com/2sahadrtoide.html

I just installed the 100gig sata tonight. But have not the greatest luck as of right now. Running the following setup now :

car2_v2.01_hijack.upgrade
v503.hijack.mk2.zImage

Might be fighting a bad ide cable also. I have a replacement. but cant find it!

Remember that you have to use the builder on any new drive, first.

Did you ever get that to work? I've been thinking about giving it a try if anyone indicated success...

g_man

I am also wondering if someone got this to work. Looking at newegg, prices for sata drives are considerably lower than old ide drives at this point. I've been fine with only 40gb up until now, so i'd be fine with a single smaller sata drive - 80gb for under 50$! - no need for space to hold 2 of them...

Has anyone used the device at http://www.cooldrives.com/2sahadrtoide.html successfully?

I've used that adapter in desktop systems. It works well. You'd want to put a little bit of hot glue on it to keep it from coming off in an automotive environment. Also, care would need to be taken to put the cable in in such a way as to not stress the adapter or the header.