I know this has probably been discussed ad nausea already, but I'd like to revisit it a little bit. The problem will current portable MP3 players are storage. 1 hour of music at 112kps doesn't cut it for me. That's why the idea of a build yourself MP3 box seems so seductive. So here is my basic idea: We need something with enough horsepower (at least a p60 speed should do), sound (16 bit, nothing special, maybe SRS), large storage and decent battery life (at least 4 hours). The engine I would envision is something really close to the Cell Computing dx-100 card which is faster than a p75 at decent power usage. I don't know if it has sound built in, but I hope so. A pc/104 sled wouldn't really be necessary, as for the minimal IO that need to be done you could make one substantially smaller- We'd need power in, sound out, Serial IDE and (preferably) an interface for PCMCIA. Video wouldn't be needed, as you really wouldn't use a HMD for this; a serial display module would do. The other serial port would be for sound and navigation, something like the remotes for portable Minidisk players. Power would be one of the largest things size wise, but I NiMH battery like I have for my PowerBook, 45wh at 5 inches by 2.5 inches by .75 inches, and would give four hours and change, depending on configuration. Configuration, you cry? Yes-- this is where the PCMCIA slots come in. One slot would be a Flash card, about 10-20 meg would be great, to hold the OS (linux custom) and playlists. The other would be for the user. Instead of a fixed IDE hard drive (although it would be nice), but modular storage via PC Card peripherals. These would include Flash and SRam Cards, CD-ROM drives, SuperDisk and Zip drives and even SCSI devices. Using some code that would automagically detect these and play from them, you could choose your media verses paying 60 bucks for a 32 meg SmartMedia Card. Most of the drive are small enough (like the PCMCIA zip drives) to be strung on a belt or bandolier (sp). Vibration and shock would be a problem, but to help this, each MP3 could be copied to the boot device, which is solid state, and spin down any rotational media you use until the next file. Seek times would suffer on intro play mode, but if the method is just "look through play list (on boot device) on LCD, load song, spin down drive" it wouldn't be too bad, and save battery power. And for pure linear play, depending on boot device size, you could copy 2 or three songs to Flash ram and keep them in queue. And going even further, you could have an accelerometer rigged up to detect them there was no movement or vibration and load files then. Comments? I know this is really OT, but it uses the same hardware as wearables so... -- Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" toWear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.blu.org
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