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.
Continue ReadingSo, 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.
Continue ReadingQuick 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.
Continue ReadingFor 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.
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