Yeah I know. I'm just poor.

The necessary "gear" for large array BGAs (including 256 pin) is a oven and an X-ray machine. No, not your kitchen oven... You must be able to control the ramp rate of the temperature and ensure it peaks at a particular temp for a specific amount of time. These parameters depend on the device(s) installed. If you want to ensure the solder joints are good (no cold solder joints, etc.) visual inspection is virtually impossible, you must x-ray the populated PCB. This would be quite a job for the DIY to complete with any degree of reliability. Our local assembly houses will remove, reball, and replace a BGA for around $200 (incl. x-ray) so I assume it would be even cheaper for installation only. Beyond that, the new BGA would likely require a new multi-layer PCB layout; and multilayer fabrication is much more expensive than 2 layer (simple double sided).

That's the beauty of the empeg, it's a true custom open source computer in your dash. When I show this to the other engineers at the office (especially the guts of it) they all respond - WOW, and these guys are DIY types. We should consider ourselves priviledged to own one (or more ).

<quote>Having seen the resistor pack used in the button hack at the recent Boston Meet I don't think I'll be doing any soldering. </quote>

If the SMD resistor array is the problem don't use it :-)
As you can see in the attached picture it's a bit dirty but it works fine...
(The black thing is just an other resistor with heat schrinking tube for isolation)

Greetings, Robert

They're real, I've seen one, and they are only six weeks away. Yaay!

I not saying that putting together an S/PDIF board is as difficult as the tuner project, but I think it will be interesting to see who gets their kits out first. Good work and good luck.

Stu

Hi.

Well, I have had a chance to finish and test the tuner module, and it works perfectly so far. I still have to test the additional options, which will require a test program of some sort, but everything else works.

I will post pictures soon of what the final thing looks like. It works well, the reception is at least as good as the original empeg tuner in both AM and FM. Assuming I can test the "added value" by then, on monday I will order a hundred PCBs and a tray of tuner modules.

There are still some logistical issues to sort out, but by the time the boards come back I should have these sorted out. It looks like I'm definitely going ahead with it, at any rate.

pca

and to think people are still spending crazy money for them on ebay

yeah and for god sake don't tell any of them about this i want a patrick added value tuner

I haven't exactly been following this tuner thread as closely as I could have, so can someone explain what "value added" features are going to be on these new tuners?

From what i can gather is that extras can be added and from a little chat to patric and what was said at the owners meet

Possibles are extra switched 12v outputs eg amp remote and aerial remote
Possible inputs Like pressure readings, temp readings
And my personal favorite was the possible G meter with an input to star field so that when you accelerate it goes faster, when you slow down it slows down and when you corner starfield goes round a corner.

What you do with these added abilites are up to you and you imagination and skill.

After meeting patrick anything is possible.

Duuuuude, The G-meter thingy tied to starfield would be COOOL!. Even cooler if it could be tied to the fonts on the info visuals. (Or even just 1 of 'em.)

After meeting patrick anything is possible.

Yeah. If anyone ever looked at the PSU circuits on the empeg mainboard, they are _huge_ compared to the one he (GOD) build into one of his custom empeg add-ons (doing the same as the empeg one, but on approx. 1/4 its size).

I won't tell you guys _which_ custom add-ons he made though. Well, one of them was on this BBS some while back: a remote mountable empeg display. It actually consisted of two parts: One replacement for the empeg VFD board in the empeg, and one add-on-board that plugs to the rear of that VFD board, and up to several hundred (sic!) feet of cable in between.
But the other add-on was even more fun.... (can you say "tease"?)

cu,
sven

PS: My PC is copying about 80GB of data currently, at the unbelievably high data rate of approx. 0.6MByte/s, so it will be finished by, well, Tuesday morning or something like that. Sheesh, I knew Linux raid5 is slow on write operations, but _that_ slow?

PS: My PC is copying about 80GB of data currently, at the unbelievably high data rate of approx. 0.6MByte/s, so it will be finished by, well, Tuesday morning or something like that. Sheesh, I knew Linux raid5 is slow on write operations, but _that_ slow?


Wow, that does sound slow, although I have no idea what numbers you should be getting..

But on my linux raid1 system, on a slow celery 500, a 2GB file just took 2.5 minutes to create, ie ~14MB/second, using approx 30% CPU. I know that calculating parity takes time, but 23 times longer???!

Some pointers - You really need the RAIDed drives all to be on independant IDE channels to be effective. I'm guessing that you already know this, and have additional channels on your mb / add-in card.
Have you checked your HDs DMA settings? Some linux distros don't optimise the HD settings by default, and leave things like DMA, write caching and multiple sector I/O disabled on boot. Use hdparm to find out what your current settings are, and to change them if necessary. Once you have found the optimum settings, I suggest scripting them in /etc/rc/rc.hdparm and making sure that script gets run from rc.sysinit before the fsck would kick in. (fsck'ing a large RAID partition without drive optimisations is painful, in fact if you can use ext3 or reiserfs, then I'd recommend it )

man hdparm is very informative.


Command being timed: "dd if=/dev/zero of=./zerofile bs=4k count=524287"
User time (seconds): 0.80
System time (seconds): 46.54
Percent of CPU this job got: 30%
Elapsed (wall clock) time (h:mm:ss or m:ss): 2:36.20
Average shared text size (kbytes): 0

Hi genixia.

PS: My PC is copying about 80GB of data currently, at the unbelievably high data rate of approx. 0.6MByte/s, so it will be finished by, well, Tuesday morning or something like that. Sheesh, I knew Linux raid5 is slow on write operations, but _that_ slow?

Wow, that does sound slow, although I have no idea what numbers you should be getting..

But on my linux raid1 system, on a slow celery 500, a 2GB file just took 2.5 minutes to create, ie ~14MB/second, using approx 30% CPU. I know that calculating parity takes time, but 23 times longer???!

It seems like I had a problem with some interrupt-sharing between my secondary (dual channel) IDE controller card (which serves the raid and only the raid) and my graphics adapter. My Linux PC crashed (or hanged) about 5 minutes after I made that post. After switching the BIOS to _not_ assign an interrupt to my VGA, it is much quicker and seemingly also more stable.
At the moment, it is copying at approx. 3MB/sec while still resyncing the raid in the background (at 2.5M/sec). Those numbers really look much more sane.

Now my only problem left is that my second ethernet card stopped working last night, which forced me to do the bad thing to run my ADSL (pppoe) connection via the same NIC as my local LAN. Well, at least I now have enough disk space again.

cu,
sven

Patrick did the layout for the car player PCB's as well, so maybe he just improved over time

Rob

A lot of stuff is down to different design decisions; the smaller PSU layout is with components on both sides, something which we couldn't do as the cost of manufacture was too high. You can't really get the mk2 PSU a *lot* smaller and still satisfy the design rules - but double-sided, you can.

The chips were designed for high-density boards with components on both sides, eg laptops.

Hugo

I'd be happy to assemble tuner kits for the Colorado area

I'd be happy to assemble tuner kits for the Colorado area

Woohoo, I'll keep that in mind when I get mine.

Oh Please please please, a remote display + Maybe controls?!! That would be awsome!!

OK I won't be greedy just a remote display. Ican add my own switcheds or use the IR remote in a pinch

Ok, this post is ungodly long now. Can someone bring me up to speed? Are these kits being made yet? I want one, so what should I do to make sure I get one? I signed up on some list a month or two ago, but haven't heard anything since, so I'm just trying to figure out what's up.

They're not out yet. Keep reading from this point and you'll find out what to do.

I wouldn't be surprised if someone put something in the Announcements forum when it happens. Or at least started a new thread here.

Or at least started a new thread here.

I'm kind of hoping that it gets piggybacked in this thread so that people who aren't following it won't notice the announcement, giving me a better chance at snagging one of the first batch.

Hi.

The part he demonstrated actually put the whole (original) display board in a remote place, including the controls that reside there. Boy, I wish you would have seen his other add-on, that was really superior to the remote VFD-board one IMHO. But no, I can't tell you what it was. But I would like both add-ons if he could sell them to me and if I could afford them, obviously.

cu,
sven

Remote display - any price - put me down for two!

Erm, why can't you say anything about it? Did all you guys have to sign an NDA or something?

Actually I'm still eagerly awaiting the first report of the meet with pics etc...

We didn't actually sign any NDA, but Patrick did ask us not to publish any info about his add-ons that wasn't already available on the BBS or other websites. If I did understand him correctly however, he is trying to get permission from his customers to publish info about those add-ons and sell them to other customers as well.
Any news on this from you, Patrick?
Rob: Are we allowed to tell more about your little DJ'ing thingy?

cu,
sven

Job (and time) permitting, I will be trying to get a report and a web site together within the next week or so.

I would also pay up-front.

Actually there are many visuals that could be "g-forced" -- like the snow effect. You can have the dancing people fall over when you hit a corner hard enough. ..etc...

Calvin