This is sort of an expansion on my ideas from a post in the General forum.

My idea is for future empeg car models to do away with the various inputs and outputs that are not plain audio - e.g. the radio in, the serial port, even the 10baseT - and replace them with a common bus. Something that's designed for high-speed serial transmission between peered devices; something that's easy to connect; something that's got standards behind it.

Call it ThingNet. empeg could supply the radio module and a RS232 interface as ThingNet modules. Third parties could add GPS devices, niftusoidal controllers and so on, because ThingNet would be a IEEE or ISO standard. empeg could even bring out a separate dockable hard drive module, so instead of ripping open your case to add more space, you simply put a(nother) hard drive module on the ThingNet chain. When you want to update it, you just connect the empeg to the external disk via the ThingNet cable supplied...

Makes things much simpler.

Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.

It's an intriguing idea, but one that I don't see working well. You are talking about creating something like USB, Firewire, or SCSI. All are very useful and support a varity of different devices, but the cost of designing an interface like what you describe for the empeg would be huge. It would involve design costs, and the cost of making the controller chip for this bus that decides where all this mixed data goes. So far, the empeg has little proprietary hardware. It uses a standard StrongARM chip, a standard audio chip, etc... Empeg mainly designed the way to connect these all together in a small package. They didn't reinvent a way to talk to a hard drive or serial device. For this reason, I don't see this idea going that far with empeg.

My empeg site is:http://24.236.3.131/empeg/

Refer to my reply in your original thread.

Rob