Okay, this is a call for somebody to implement something that is (1) useful, (2) moderately easy (for a kernel hacker), and (3) a freakin' great way to get involved and become a Hero!

All Empeg/RioCar units have a USB-slave port, even the "lowly" Mark-1 units. But currently, this uses a dedicated (though "open") protocol, which only talks to the Rio tools, like Emplode.

But.. since it's all done in Kernel space, we have source code for it all. So..

Let's modify the driver to emulate a USB-ethernet adaptor.

This mostly would involve just changing the way the existing driver identifies itself over the link, and then tying the read/write interface into the Linux ethernet driver models. Lots of example code exists in the kernel today for all of this, so figuring out what has to be done is not impossible for a moderately skilled hacker.

Why? Because this would then make the Empeg, any Empeg, appear to be ethernet connected to the host computer. This means that standard applications built upon TCP/IP would then be able to communicate with it under Windows, Linux, or any other OS that supports USB-Ethernet adaptors.

This would enable FTP, HTTP connections to the player, without an ethernet card or hub, even to a Mark-1 player!

CL, Eh?

All we need is somebody willing to have a run at it (I'm booked).

That would turn many of us MK1 owners into happy campers A long tme ago there was talk of HTTP over serial but nothing ever became of it. The Hijack mods are the only thing that makes me like my MK2 over the lowly MK1s, in the car playing music there's no difference.

Alan

Would it have to emulate a specific Ethernet adaptor, or is there a generic USB Ethernet device class and driver (like the mass storage one) ?

I don't know if there's a generic one. If not, then just pick a very common one to "emulate", such as "Belkin" or "eTEK", with which the 2.4.xx usbnet.c driver already knows how to communicate, as do the win32 drivers.

-ml

Well, I have experimented with some same ideas, but at userspace level. I've got proxy-software running on windows, which is fed into the usb channel. On the empeg side an app is listening on usb and forwards data to a tcp port. The windows software is working; I haven't got a working empeg client yet.
Unfortunately I'm not skilled as a kernel programmer; I know most modern programming-languages, but nothing hardware-related. How to write an ethernet-adapter-driver for win32???
If nobody takes up on the task, We can allways use the proxy idea. let the proxy-server map ports on the windows machine to the empeg.

Well, if you really want to just support the one platform (specific windows version), then I suppose the protocol to use would be PPP.

If you can get a windows PPP client pointed at the USB, then on the Empeg side it oughta be pretty easy to get PPP running off the USB as well.

But more complete solution would be ethernet emulation for some popular USB-ethernet device, so that we get multi platform support out of this.

Cheers

Oh.. the idea here is NOT to write a driver of any kind for Windows or Linux or MacOS, but rather, to modify the Empeg's USB-slave driver to emulate some existing USB-ethernet device, for which drivers are already available under Windows, Linux, MacOS, etc..

Cheers

I had been looking around, and I'm unsure if any existing USB-ethernet-driver will work with the empeg USB-port. I though that every USB-implementation had specific channels and speeds to which it is restricted.

If this can be done, it would be brilliant. Excellent lateral thinking.

A long time ago, there was a lot of talk about implementing PPP-over-USB, but I don't think anyone ever got it working under Windows.

What would be exceptionally cool is if we could choose to emulate a driver for which the default install of Win98-and-later automatically includes a plug-and-play driver. That way, you could just plug the empeg into the PC and it would just detect it.

Dunno how to have it handle the case of two possible USB devices on the same wire, though. Because that USB wire already identifies itself as "Empeg Car" or whatever when it's plugged in. So is it possible for the driver to fake the computer into thinking it's two different devices (Empeg USB and a faked USB ethernet adapter) at the same time?

How about emulating a USB hub? Then have these virtual devices hanging off that?

This is getting to be quite complicated!

- Trevor

I've just downloaded the belkin driver for win32, hacked up the inf-file, deleted the empegusb entry and added the belkin one. I started a 'cat /dev/usb' on the empeg to see if something was sent and rebooted the PC ( win2000 ). After reboot the device is inactive with error :

This device is not working properly because Windows cannot load the drivers required for this device. (Code 31)

No output showed up on the empeg side. I replaced the USB-id in the inf files, but that is probably not the way it is going to work...

I think you may have to also hack the empeg driver in the empeg kernel for the detection to work correctly, though one would think hacking the .inf should have come close..

??

Yes, you've gotta hack the empeg usb driver itself (in the empeg/hijack kernels) so that it identifies the empeg as a network device.

-ml

No need for more than one device.

So long as it can do "ethernet", Emplode can talk to it.

Do you know that is true for the Mk1 ? Do we know that the player is the same on both Mk1 and Mk2, it is possible that the Ethernet side of things is complied out on the player as well as the kernel ?

usbnet is *not* what you want to emulate - that's a usb host-host adaptor.

You want to emulate something like a pegasus. Should be quite possible.

Hugo

According to the USB specs, it is quite allowed for a "physical unit" to have several "logical interfaces"
My D-link cheap-cheap digital camera is both a digital camera and a digital video camera when connected to my laptop.

The ideal solution would (of course?) be that the empeg player has both an ethernet "emulation" and a storage device "emulation", that way, it could be mounted as a "harddisk" on quite a lot of OS platforms.
The "read file" for mp3 files work seems to have been done already by mlord. Writing mp3-files to this disc, and having them show up in the playlists may be trickier, but not too much...

(I wish I had more spare time to write cool projects like that)

Marius (Escort Cab + Mark II)

The ethernet and tcp/ip stuff IS missing from Mark1 kernels, and maybe from the player binary also. But once we get the USB thingie working, we'll find a way around that issue too.

-ml

Okay, that's a cool idea -- emulating a mass storage adaptor, in addition to the ethernet-device emulation. I like it, especially for Mark-2 players! I like it A LOT!

You're right about not needing to emulate the empeg USB interface.

Since the USB driver needs to be changed anyway then the Mk1 kernel would need to be recompiled so adding back the ethernet and TCP/IP support is just a matter of turning it back on.

Another matter would be the player software though... Anybody want to try running the Mk1 player binary on their Mk2 to see if there is any TCP/IP support in it? Unless somebody at empeg can tell us?

- Trevor

I was rather thinking of doing it the other way around.. perhaps trying the Mk2 player on a Mk1 unit, once the ethernet is functional.

But that will probably just run us out of memory or something, in which case we leave in the dedicated USB functionality, in addition to adding USB-ethernet and possibly USB-mass-storage to it's bag of tricks. The TCP/IP will allow things like kftpd/khttpd to be used, and in the worst case emplode can just muck around with the dedicated USB interface as before.

-ml

I have just checked the two player exes, they are definitely different.

mk2 - 1323440 bytes
mk1 - 1192632 bytes

I think someone did a ext2 fs for windows, didn't they? You'd really need that to make it useful to "normal" users.

You should also be aware that the USB chip in the mk1 is particularly pants and will drop packets fairly often (maybe 1 in 100000 32byte packets). The mk2 controller also does do the same, although less frequently.

Hugo

Every day I visit this BBS I seem to learn a new British English word. I had never heard something described as "pants" before... For those Americans (like me) who are interested...

In reply to:

---

“It’s pants”
An informal survey on the usage of the term 'pants'

Gareth (from Wales): "It means something's bad, something's rubbish. It's an exclamation of displeasure. It is not swearing..."

Amanda (from London): "It's a way of converting rude swearing to mild swearing."

Andrew (from Lancashire): "It's pants. It means 's***' or 'crap'. It is not swearing, but I wouldn't use it in polite company. It might be used as a substitute for 'that's bollocks'".

Lindsay (from Glasgow): "It means that's crap or rubbish. It is not swearing, but I wouldn't use it around older people."

Contributor Judith notes: "I have only heard 'pants' used by a young man at work. I used to work in <government department> where they are very politically correct in everything. The man was reprimanded for using the word 'f***'. He started to use 'pants'. I recently read in <newspaper> that pants meant 'rubbish'. In my teens my peers used to say knickers. We used it as a 'polite' way of saying 'f***'. So when my colleague used 'pants', I thought it was just a male gender version of 'knickers'.

The archives at deja indicate that the term 'pants' has been used on the television programmes "The Mary Whitehouse Experience" and "The Young Ones".

---

Taken from http://www.alt-usage-english.org/ucle/ucle9.html

A very on-topic post, I know...

Every day I visit this BBS I seem to learn a new British English word. I had never heard something described as "pants" before.

Americans and other aliens should also note that -- while "it's pants" is an expression of disapproval -- "it's the pants" is short for "it's the ants' pants", an expression of approval.

Emphatic forms of the disapproving version are "a pile of pants" and "a bag of pants".

Peter

Do you guys find American slang as cool as we generally find British slang?

I dunno... "That's the bomb" just doesn't hold up does it... Which begs another question... is the slang of British youth as different/annoying as it is in America?

The main difference is that young American English slang is usually just co-opted Black English slang from 15 years ago. British English has a wonderful history of slang that American English has never even begun to have. For example, the height of American English slang paradigms seems to be to invert the meaning of a word (``bad'' for ``good'', etc.). The height of British English slang paradigms seems to be to rhyme the word you're slanging with a multiword phrase and then drop the last word -- the one that made it rhyme in the first place (``butcher's'' for ``butcher's hook'' for ``look'', etc.). Judge for yourself which is more interesting.

The height of British English slang paradigms seems to be to rhyme the word you're slanging with a multiword phrase and then drop the last word

That's cockney rhyming slang, and nobody really uses that now - with the possible exception of used car salesmen and characters in movies such as Snatch.

Rob

Americans and other aliens should also note that -- while "it's pants" is an expression of disapproval -- "it's the pants" is short for "it's the ants' pants", an expression of approval.

We have the same thing here. Fairly recently, "It's The Shit" has become an expression of the highest approval. You wouldn't necessarily use it to describe another person, but you certainly would use it to describe a nice gadget. The car player, for example, is definitely The Shit.

Word.


Back on topic, this thread is way beyond anything I could contribute to, but I have to admit an odd facination with it. Quite the interesting project!