Rockbox Development > New Ports
Rockbox Player - Project to design and build a Free/Open hardware audio player
bmordue:
Possibly of interest is this thread
http://www.head-fi.org/forums/showthread.php?t=246943
on head-fi, an audio site with emphasis on headphone listening and a very active DIY community.
scharkalvin:
We REALLY do need to see an open source hardware player become available. Soon all the 'hackable' players will be out of production and hard to find used and all the new players are locked down to keep them from running third party firmware (new ipods, zune, etc).
One development platform that I've seen is the NGW100 from Atmel. This uses their AVR32 cpu. This processor is an arm-like risc (not an arm instruction set) with lots of on board I/O. It has a 16bit 50khz sample rate stereo DAC that is suitable for AC97 style audio. It also has a build in color LCD driver that will do up to 2048x2048 pixels, dual 10/100 ethernet, high speed USB, external flash memory interface, pixel co-processor for video acceleration, etc. It's supported by GNU tools (Atmel even has a version of their AVR studio jtag debugger that runs on Linux).
I've seen a hw example for using a PSP lcd display on this board: http://dma.elektroda.net/projects/ngw100_ext_lcd/ngw100_ext_lcd.html
Needless to say I'd like to look into this. The NGW100 already runs Linux and the best part is the price, $90 from Digikey, Mouser, Arrow, etc...
What do you think? Is this cpu fast enough?
Bagder:
Fast enough for what?
And besides, getting a Rockbox-capable player is quite a lot more than just finding a dev board that can run Linux.
scharkalvin:
I meant is the cpu up to the task of running the required codecs (I suspect so, since Linux on this platform has been running mplayer).
I agree there is much more required to build a media player than a platform that runs Linux. (The fact that it DOES run Linux means it is open source friendly and that the required documentation for a rockbox port IS available).
One of the first design choices required if someone were to design a player would be a choice of cpu platform. The small volume involved would leave out any of the PortalPlayer processors. The disadvantage of the AVR32 is the BGA package (for home brew hobby construction anyway). A pc board house would have to do the assembly.
Anyway, sounds like a project to get ones feet wet in learning schematic capture and board layout. I did install the open sourced gEDA tools on my Linux box (good excuse to get a larger LCD monitor....)
linuxstb:
--- Quote from: scharkalvin on October 12, 2007, 08:34:53 AM ---I agree there is much more required to build a media player than a platform that runs Linux. (The fact that it DOES run Linux means it is open source friendly and that the required documentation for a rockbox port IS available).
--- End quote ---
That doesn't follow at all. There are many devices out there which run Linux in conjunction with closed-source drivers and applications - the latter being where all the interesting device-specific code is. The source code released by such manufacturers is rarely more than a standard Linux kernel source tarball, along with busybox and other standard utils.
Google for "tivoization".
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