MP3 Box Issues

• Marc Lewis
• Date : January 1, 2006
• Categories :
• Tags : pre-2010 ,projects

Well, a few days ago Jessica started having problems with it. The box started locking up. Took a bit of effort to get it back online again (since its headless), three or four reboots before everything came back in. Not happy.

My first guess is that it is heat related. The only fan in the unit is the CPU fan. The inside of the case is quite warm. I haven’t put a thermometer into it yet, so I can’t say exactly how warm. It first locked up when she was using it “locally” with MPD playing. This does require a bit more CPU power than streaming which is what she has been doing mostly since I gave it to her. In fact, it GMediaServer had been streaming to the HomePod for just about 12 hours a day for the prior two weeks. Simple disk reads and sending packets over the network, very little CPU power. This all started happening on the 22nd or 23rd.

MP3 Box v0.1

• Marc Lewis
• Date : December 18, 2005
• Categories :
• Tags : pre-2010 ,projects

Its been a busy few weeks since my last posting. I spent a couple Sundays working on the web interface and the streaming interface. It still needs quite a bit of work, but it is very usable now. I “released” it for Jessica to use about a week and a half ago.

MP3 Player base distribution update

• Marc Lewis
• Date : November 24, 2005
• Categories :
• Tags : pre-2010 ,projects

So, I’ve been working on the MP3 player project quite a bit over the last few weeks. Christmas is a month away, so with the limited time I’ve got to work on it, I’d rather do that than post.

The remote control that comes with the Allwell box doesn’t work. Well, it does, but they tried to be clever and map it to the PS/2 mouse/keyboard port. It would probably work fine if their documentation matched and if they didn’t use the null character for the play button. Thats very difficult to match since many devices and programs use 0 to terminate arrays and strings and such.

Happy Halloween!

• Marc Lewis
• Date : October 31, 2005
• Categories :
• Tags : pre-2010 ,ego ,halloween

So, yesterday afternoon Jessica and I went out to get pumpkins to carve. Its become a bit of a tradition for us over the last several years that we both really enjoy. Since we went out on the day before Halloween, pickings were a bit slim, but we managed to find a couple good ones.

MP3 Player Update

• Date : October 18, 2005
• Categories : pre-2010 ,projects
• Tags : pre-2010 ,projects

Quick update on the MP3 player project. I spent several hours yesterday looking at cases, embedded systems, and got really, really frustrated. The Home Theater PC (HTPC) is just now starting to catch on, but the manufacturers are charging way too much for a case. Granted, these are some really nice looking cases, but the prices they want for some MP3 of them took them right out of the running.

Simple Set Top MP3 Player

• Marc Lewis
• Date : October 16, 2005
• Categories : pre-2010 ,projects
• Tags : pre-2010 ,projects

For a couple years now, Jessica has wanted a simple, standalone MP3 player that she could put on her desk or on a shelf, or entertainment cabinet or someplace else thats out of the way. Thats all it needs to do is play MP3’s, have a simple LCD or VFD display on it to show what song is playing and have a web or other interface to make and save playlists. Oh, and it needs to have a hard drive in it to store all this stuff. Software MP3 players for Windows try to do too much and be too flashy. Plus she wants to be able to stream or otherwise listen to music in other rooms of the house. So this means a full fledged computer is out of the question. Too much power, too loud, too expensive just for this purpose.