[IDEA/DEV] Rockbox Internet.

[Steven]

Hello to all of the RockBox Community.
I just joined, but i had a Sansa CLIP+ with RockBox on it, sadly i gave it away to my sister, but i just received a Sansa Clip Zip, Which i Installed RockBox on it.

So I had a bit of a crazy idea, which i soon hope to develop, It will be for the Sansa Clip Zip at alpha stage, and will be ported to the other players which support microphones.

I always wanted to create a Internet Related app for devices which could not support it. And thanks to my browsing i found a very useful plugin for rockbox: PluginPitchDetector - that was a great find and thanks to the developer(s) for making it, its the best starting place.
The PluginPitchDetector can record sounds and tell you the Tone, so my theory is basically this:
- Use twilio as a third party service, which a user will call when they want to use my Internet Plugin.
- You will need a speaker attached to the sansa clip zip, then call the number giving, and press a button on the sansa clip which is will say ether random letters or numbers (this is for SENDING Information)
- The user Puts the sansa clip mic near the phone (you have to be in a very quite area to work) and the phone will produce tones which the sansa clip will understand and show your requested information in text form.

There would be alot of scripting and programming and no guarantee it will be a free service as each call per min is one cent and the "bill" could add up :-)

But the "internet" would be really really simple and SLOW - I doubt it would be practical to allow images or any type of MMO game, but simple stuff like reading tweets or email subjects would be easy to do, in the event of you only have a rockbox player and no mobile phone or laptop.

I was thinking of making a interface with android which the rockbox player can do higher internet related stuff but then again if you have a android phone why would you need to browse the internet on a rockbox player.

I mostly wrote this to see if there was others besides me interested in this, i will be doing the scripting serverside and the programming. I SHOULD have a alpha release within a month and i plan to update this thread often.

[Steven]

Sorry i put this thread on the wrong forum, my mistake!
Thanks for putting in on the right one!

[ikeboy]

This sounds like an intriguing idea . Would that be similar to dsl ? Maybe there would be a Ethernet to line-in connector that would allow direct access to Internet protocols

[saratoga]

If you want to send data to a player, using USB might make more sense.

However, internet access on such simple devices will be both very difficult and not very useful.  You will need to implement a network stack, and then applications that can somehow work well on a tiny screen with no easy way to input user interactions. 

[Steven]

This sounds like an intriguing idea . Would that be similar to dsl ? Maybe there would be a Ethernet to line-in connector that would allow direct access to Internet protocols

Its would be nothing like DSL lol - the speeds honestly would be like the first dial up modem.
There is no hardware needed besides the rockbox compatible player.

I guess you can compare my internet technique like a morse code like device.

[Steven]

If you want to send data to a player, using USB might make more sense.

However, internet access on such simple devices will be both very difficult and not very useful.  You will need to implement a network stack, and then applications that can somehow work well on a tiny screen with no easy way to input user interactions.

USB would of course make more sense, then again why would you use a rockbox player if you have access to a computer lol.

I understand it will take a long time to make - and i know it will not be of much use.

There is not a "network stack" as you would think, it just converts sounds to data, i plan to create a plugin that will act like a text based client to read web related media and there will be input support, but yea, it will take a while.

Never said this would be easy or would it be useful to everyone. But i think its a fun idea that can expand to other no internet devices.

[[Saint]]

Let me first start by saying that neither myself nor anyone else is trying to dissuade you from doing this.

However, I think you'll very quickly find that your "it just converts sound to data" idea is nowhere near as simple as it sounds.

You'll need a way of confirming all "packets" (whatever you're going to be using for a unit of data) have been received, intact, in order, and be able to implement a retry if one fails. If you're just converting data to sound and back again (that's actually quite fun, and there's several ways it can be done), especially with what (if I understand correctly) will be a dual speaker, dual microphone setup, without any form of error or loss checking it would be nigh impossible to ensure the data wasn't corrupted during transfer by external noise and/or crosstalk from the speakers, etc.


[Saint]