Rockbox Development > New Ports
Rockbox Player - Project to design and build a Free/Open hardware audio player
mocad_tom:
Hi,
this is my first post here, but I read this discussion for quite some time.
I have a proposal for this project.
I think Rockbox is very interesting as a platform for mobile sensors.
I am in an ehealth-project where you monitor vitalparameters like heartbeat, body-core-temperature, blood-glucose and so on.
All this vitalparameters are no problem if you don't want to be mobile.
Form-factor, cpu-power, battery-runtime and the OS(rockbox) is really good if you compare it with other embedded "homegrown" systems.
The only thing which Rockbox-Player has to offer is an easy accessible SPI-port(in Hardware and in Software) where engineers can connect their A/D-Samplers or acceleration sensors with. I think that there is a big crowd of research and development people out there who are fighting against battery-runtime-, file-system-, form-factor-troubles, to low CPU-clocks and not enough RAM. The portable mp3-players are very good optimised in this area.
I don't exactly know the licensing stuff Rockbox has - GPL AFAIK.
Here is my second not so popular proposal:
If the Rockbox-Hardware + -Software is in a LGPL it is possible to develop closed-source-schematics-modules which connect directly to SPI-port.
It is possible to develop closed source software-modules and algorithms to analyse the captured parameters from the SPI-port.
And here comes the goody for the project:
The main-platform (the MP3-player-stuff - hardware and software ) is open source and it is mandatory to publicize the advances which a company has made in this area.
So if a company says the platform is very promising, it develops a SPI-Hardware-Module and a library to talk to the hardware - this is closed source. The next step is they want to sell this product so they have to make the Rockbox-Player smaller, they tweak for e.g. the USB driver-support and so on -> this tweaks have to be publicized (not the schematics for the SPI module).
And so both sides - the community and the company profits from this very cool platform.
What do you think of it?
Regards,
Tom
Domonoky:
Hi,
About your second proposal:
I think it would surely possible to build a proprietary extension Modul for such a rockbox player as proposed here.
But a closed Source Software module is not possible without violating Rockboxs Licence (GPL).
The GPL forbids linking with non-opensource code. Remember that Rockboxs plugins link directly to rockbox code, unlike a normal PC program.
It could perhaps be possible with a LGPL middleman, but this a grey-area.
casainho:
Christian from Pasen did answered yesterday to one my e-mail:
I'm sorry but our company has decided to invest on the mobile phone device,and at the moment we can't afford to develop two devices,we are out of budget.
If the phone goes well maybe we'll have a look at it again.
And the first message of Christian here, in this forum message:
Hi Guys,
my name is Christian and I came here while looking for some skilled engineer to work on google android. ...
I understand, phone mobile devices are attractive, they can also play MP3 - I see a lot of people using them to listen music with phones or even without phones. Who wants to buy an MP3/MP4 player if one can have it on their mobile phone?
---
I did updated the information about flash LED code: http://code.google.com/p/rockboxplayer/wiki/Flash_LED
I would like to know If I am doing good or If I am doing something wrong like not initialize the structures - I am really a newbie in C:
http://code.google.com/p/rockboxplayer/source/browse/trunk/%20rockboxplayer/flash_led.c
Thank you.
mocad_tom:
Thank you for your comments.
I found a statement about this in the mail archive:
http://www.rockbox.org/mail/archive/rockbox-archive-2005-01/0285.shtml
I think that this is a quite clear statement pro GPL.
All compatible licenses are allowed as well.
This hint you mentioned -> a plugin in the middle which is LGPLed is a point to start with.
PluginPacbox plays in a quite similar area:
There is a hardware emulator which is GPLed but the ROM-files are not(AFAIK).
A thing which is mentioned the whole thread long is:
Who will buy the rockbox-player-boards?
I'm quite sure that there are a lot of mobile-embedded-developers who need a development basis where they can connect a developed SPI-Piggy-Pack. There should be room for a board which is stacked on top of the basic board.
The stacked approach could be realised similar to this:
http://particle.teco.edu/devices/upcoming_main.html
If this proposal is a no-go than it is okay for me.
But I think this will open up new possibilities for rockbox.
At the moment we are thinking about an abstract and a presentation for mocomed 2008 (mobile computing in medicine) and one possible area is to show the benefits an open-source-OS offers for mobile vital-parameter-sensors.
Applications like the frwd-sports-computer could be very easy to implement on top of a rock-box-device which has an expansion slot for a gps-piggy-pack:
http://www.frwd.fi/index.php?71
Regards,
Tom
Edit:
What is wrong with the bulletin board? Where is the post of casainho I intended to answer?
Just to answer the question of casainho:
Hi casainho,
I'm a smartphone software engineer(Windows-Mobile-native, .net compact Framework, Symbian-native, J2ME), so I'm not so deep into this stuff.
In our research and development project we are discussing at the moment about how much intelligence a mobile sensor has to offer.
The electrical-engineer-project-colleagues (who are working in another company) use TI MSP430 chips as a hardware basis.
They have a not so optimal software development cycle.
If I say this to them they throw stones at me ;D
In this area rockbox offers a very good approach (think of the VMware with a ready-to-use toolchain).
So much of the high level stuff can be implemented in VMware - this is a lot faster then developing the hole bunch of code on the MSP430.
So they don't use the possibilities a open-source-project could offer.
Back to the expansion-slots for mobile devices.
This project is quite different but I think it could help:
http://www.sunspot.co.uk/Projects/sweexproject.htm
I think there are similarities. You can buy a really low-cost-edimax-router and modify it. First of all you have to replace the firmware with a AFAIK openwrt linux (it is a branch which is called midge). On the board layout you can see the pins for the COM-Port.
Then there are drivers for the RS232-port and for I2C and GPIO and with this there is a lot of home automation stuff possible (sensors and actuators). The LEDs are connected to GPIO-cannels.
I hope that it is a little clearer now.
Regards,
Tom
casainho:
DSPdap V2 was released on 1 May
I just saw today that V2 of DSPdap was resealed on 1 May :-) - thats a project made by Roger Quadros aka Spark.
News on V2: Li-ion battery support with built-in charger (USB); SD/MMC card support; Line-in recording and digitizing to SD card; SDRAM - more memory for more codecs and LCD; Small form factor (9cm x 5cm) --> http://dspdap.sourceforge.net/
DSPdap have all that Rockbox Player pretends to have, less the display and the MCU. The MCU is TMS320C55x 16-bit fixed-point DSP, which since I know, don't have a free software compiler as ARM MCUs have and maybe because of that DSPdap can't run Rockbox firmware :-(
I am very happy to see that now DSPdap sells in his site PCBs for $25, cheap price, IMO. Congratulations Roger!!
I am even more confident now that Rockbox Player will be available worldwide and in a modest price. If Roger can design and sell PCBs worldwide for that prices, great for the project!!
Roger being working on Rockbox Player means (my guess) that we will reuse the hardware, we just need to change the MCU for that ARM9 and add a display :-) - in fact, I am being changing some e-mails with Roger and we will use AT91SAM9261 MCU because of the TFT LCD support.
We must now find a LCD suitable for AT91SAM9261.
---
Tom, all that work supported on that strong based hardware router - but that base must be very good, cheap and available and after that hacks can happen.
I would like to have a stable, strong base hardware, good in audio quality and world available, after that, new versions, hacks/improvements will happen.
If I understand you correctly, some one already suggest a near idea:
http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=6751.msg112395#msg112395
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