Hi

I had this crazy idea about turning old hardware into a car music player, and i already have some old HW to make this project:

Motherboard with Pentium133 or Cyrix 166
32MB EDO RAM
1.6GB HD
10MB ethernet car
16bits soundcard

And I'm thinking about buying a CD-ROM drive and perhaps a soundcard that makes less noise

I'm fine with compiling kernels, i can do some programming, scripting, and such but i'd rather not reinvent the wheel :wink:

Description:
The OS will be GNU/Linux (surprise surprise )

I'm thinking about a ext2 partition for the OS, and something else for the partitions that stores the configurations and music.

For input i'm thinking about taking apart some old keyboard and use the existing electronics and making my own keys and also use the soundcard's game port, which gives me 4 buttons and 2 analog axes (great for volume control!)

Visual Output is most likely to be limited to 8 LEDS connected to the printer port and the 3 LEDS on the keyboard.

Sound output should be the music and some beeps and stuff.

and no X of course, so all programs will have to be CLI based, and i will not have a console or anything besides LEDS to watch

This system should be capable of playing mp3, ogg from both HD and cd-rom and also play normal audio cd's.
It should be capable of copying the ogg and mp3 cds to HD.

Now the questions:
1 -should i use the p133 or cyrix 166?
2 -do you think the HD and cd-rom player can work well on a car? (i do intend to provide some isolation from the car's vibrations)
3 -should i use some FS that does aggressive caching? which one would be best?
4 -do you think it's possible with this HW to have speech synthesizing/recognition? With what software?
5 -if i have a cd mounted, how do i eject it using the drive eject button?
6 -To copy music from computer to car, i'm thinking about setting up some light ftp server, what do you think? what server is best suited for this?
7 -How do i make sound volume proportional to some joystick axis?

stuff i've come up with so far, please comment:
I also want to start CD's automatically after i insert then. so far i've only found
http://freshmeat.net/projects/cdde/.
it's a daemon that calls an arbitrary command when a cd of some type is inserted. Is it the only way of doing this?

for the software, i've found Music Player Daemon http://musicpd.org
It's easily controlled by console, can play mp3, ogg and some other formats, it can do crossover and volume control, but doesn't do fade i/out, anyone knows a way of doing that?
It also doesn't play audio CDs, what is the most simple program to play audio cds?

I'm the quest for the fastest boot time possible, i've found Software Suspend http://softwaresuspend.berlios.de
Has anyone tried it before? Do you think the speed gain is worth the trouble?
Are there other ways to speed up booting ?

Any other comments or sugestions are welcome

Thanks in advance

Only one question. How will you get 110V / 220V power
to the ps of the computer inside the car? If you don't get
power, none of the rest of that stuff matters...but then
again, maybe this is simple and I've missed something.
Or is the car sitting in the garage without a motor, and
you'll use and extension cord?

Hi

There are 3 solutions that i know of to get power from the car battery:

buying a DC->AC converter and plugging a standard AT power supply to it (i think this is inefficient(?) and there is the fan noise issue)
buying a DC->DC converter
making a DC->DC converter ( there are schematics on the internet)

Either way, there should be no voltage peaks and power should'nt fail during ignition.
Also normal PC drives require 5v and 12v (i'm not sure about laptops)

You can get complete barebones systems that run off 12V see here that are used in mobile applications.
CDROM should not be a problem as far as vibrations are concerned. The hard drive I would mount in a carrier using springs. Mount it using 8 springs in opposing positions near each corner.

Thanks for the input

Those mini-itx boards are quite attractive for this kind of project, but my budget is low so i'll stick to the old HW

But that HD mounting seems like a nice idea!

Okay anybody know where i can get one of these LCD screens that i need. Premade. Yes yes, make fun of me, but my skills with a soldering iron are non existant. Another question is, once i get this thing plugged into my parallel port (thats how it looks like you do it according to a few sites i've looked at) how do i 'tell' it what to display. Is it gonna require some CRAZY shell scripting perhaps? Then also somebody wanna tell me exactly how to do the keymapping thing. I can get a keypad for dirt, but how do i 'tell' the comuter 'hey when i hit this key, go into that directory, if i hit it again play the song that you are displaying on the screen' 'this button means up' etc, carp like that.

parallel communication is possible but requires lots of wires and wire distance can become a problem

Found this on a quick search:
http://www.seetron.com/slcds.htm
Many more should be out there

For car application, you will want one with backlight or something like that.

As for controlling them, i suppose just sendind some stuff to /dev/ttySX using a script or something should be enough

As for keypad, control will be largely dependent on what software you will be using.

And don't be afraid of the soldering iron