4/4/08: So I just got a new truck a few weeks ago. It's a 2008 Toyota Tacoma 4x4, and I really like it. I also noticed that there's plenty of space behind the seat. Plenty of space for something that I've wanted to do for ten years: put an mp3 player in my car!
1998 was before MP3car.com. It really was just as the internet was getting popular... Cost has always been prohibitive, though, as Mini-ITX hadn't been released yet and there were virtually no "small" let alone stable platforms to develop mobile applications on yet. 2000-2001 opened a few more doors however, as 802.11b started to become popular and re-kindled my interest in putting something together. I was living in the dorms at ASU at the time, and had my own linux server in my room called somaholiday. I wanted to put a playlist up on that, along with some MP3 files, get in my car, drive out of the parking structure, automatically hop on the wireless internet, and copy the files directly to a local drive for play on my drive. It all made sense, and was much more interesting than my physics class. Money was an obstacle again, as well as space and having a semi-reliable system to play stuff off of.
My interest died for a while, as I moved back home and stuff. GIS became more popular in 2005 and Google Maps was born, along with cheap and accurate (with the death of Selective Availability) GPS receivers. I paid little attention as I was working on finishing college at CSUF in the Theatre Department. I spent most of my time in the car listening to the radio.
Now, I'm done with college, have a new truck, and a whopping 15/15 megabit Internet connection at home. It's time to start work on a new project.
It's in its infancy, but I think I can make a worthwhile device with the following hardware:
That adds up to $97.34, a very worthwhile investment. I'll probably have to create a small circuit or buy a small DC-DC power supply to go from 12VDC/14.8VDC to the 5v required for the router and whatever the hub needs. No Big Deal.
Things that I want to be able to do include:
Getting the WRT to play audio will be difficult, but not impossible. I can probably do it in the span of a day. Pairing my phone and writing a custom application on the other hand, sounds harder than anything I've ever tried before. It might be easier to forget bluetooth altogether and do it through WiFi, as my phone supports that and simple web applications are fairly easy to write. I could also control it with a laptop this way. Hey, if I do that, I save $5!
4/6/08: I should be getting my usb audio adapter in tomorrow. Here are a few starting links to explore:
7/6/08: Well, I finally got off my lazy ass and took the stuff home to work on!
I got the device to light up and /dev/sound/dsp to appear! Turns out it's happier with USB 1.1 instead of USB 2.0. We'll see how it does with sound after a bit. So, here's the procedure of what I've done so far:
My script is looking like this to start:
insmod /jffs/lib/modules/2.4.30/usbcore.o insmod /jffs/lib/modules/2.4.30/ehci-hcd.o mkdir /tmp/root/modules tar zxvf /jffs/kernel-modules-sound-usb-2.4.30.tgz -C /tmp/root/modules insmod /tmp/root/modules/soundcore.o insmod /tmp/root/modules/snd-page-alloc.o insmod /tmp/root/modules/snd.o insmod /tmp/root/modules/snd-rawmidi.o insmod /tmp/root/modules/snd-hwdep.o insmod /tmp/root/modules/snd-timer.o insmod /tmp/root/modules/snd-pcm.o insmod /tmp/root/modules/snd-mixer-oss.o insmod /tmp/root/modules/snd-pcm-oss.o insmod /tmp/root/modules/snd-usb-lib.o insmod /tmp/root/modules/snd-usb-audio.o
I'll get audio one way or another tonight. Though, I need to find headphones first.
More to come later.