SO are you saying for around 500 Ish plus parts I could have a remote face and remote buttons on an empeg ??

Keep in mind the empeg would be mounted under the passanger side seat and the wires would have to reach 6 to 8 feet (with routing) for the display and controlls ?

Would the remote display be fast enough to switch songs and see play lists ???

My thoughts so far:

Control is already handled by a remote or through the sony stalk.

Video. The fastest interface on the empeg is the ethernet interface. So, we're in need of an ethernet to composite video adapter. Amazingly enough, no one makes one. There are a few video-over-ethernet encoders/decoders, but they're not designed to receive video from a computer. Back to the drawing board (or google search box). What has an ethernet jack and a composite video interface? A videophone. Will it auto answer a call and full screen the video? It sure seems like it from the manual.

Now, the only problem is a H.323 implementation for the empeg that will dial a set IP address, and send the screen contents as the video. My limited perusal of sourceforge hasn't found the right open source project to canabalize yet, but this seems like a good start.

Matthew

The remote display is something I really would like to see. I'm definitely buying a kit with a VFD from Mike when he's ready to sell them. I'm more than willing to be a "beta tester" for any program Vincent writes. I'd also be willing to donate a few dollars so that Vincent can get a kit from Mike to help write/test the program. Any other takers?

SO are you saying for around 500 Ish plus parts I could have a remote face and remote buttons on an empeg ??

I was talking about the parts for someone to make it themselves, but if you're interested in me building a complete solution you can essentially drop in, you should email me and we'll work something out.. vincent@applesolutions.com. The money you're talking sounds reasonable to me for that kind of development.

Keep in mind the empeg would be mounted under the passanger side seat and the wires would have to reach 6 to 8 feet (with routing) for the display and controlls?

My Empeg is in my trunk (see the pics if you're interested).. the only thing connecting it to the display/controller is a long (maybe 12 foot, it's a small car) serial cable. The controller board gets it's power from the console area in my case.

Would the remote display be fast enough to switch songs and see play lists ???

With my current software it averages about 3 frames/second on my display, which is the slowest speed of any of the display choices. There's no problem using menus or text info modes. With better drawing methods I'm slowly working on the speed can be significantly improved and some visuals might work well too. Some of the faster displays can do 25+fps even with the current unoptimized software.

One thing you may not have seen (it's buried in the other thread in a couple places) is that these displays are 1-bit, each pixel is fully on or off. The Empeg display is 2 bit: fully on, dim, dimmer, and off. So the display doesn't look quite as pretty, but it's still perfectly usable.

Control is already handled by a remote or through the sony stalk.

Some (probably adequate) control.. the stalk doesn't provide full functional replication of the fascia controls. I don't think I'm conveying just how cool this joystick is I find it far easier to use than the 4 separate buttons on the Empeg and knob way over on the other side of the car, and I actually use the knob actions now because they're right there for menu navigation instead of reaching up in the air for other controls. If I ever put my Empeg back in the dash I'd still keep the knob.

Video. The fastest interface on the empeg is the ethernet interface. So, we're in need of an ethernet to composite video adapter.

Good luck with that (really), it's definitely an interesting idea but I don't see that being very practical. Speed on the serial connection is only a problem because I've made it one for myself by picking a big high-res display that's annoyingly low speed. There's a 140x32 module (7000-series) about the same size as the Empeg's that runs at 115.2kbps... 115200/(140*32) = ~25fps with the simplest (and least efficient) drawing method you could think of, "10: blast the entire 140x32px bitmap out to the display; 20: goto 10;". I picked a 256x64 that runs at 38.4.. 4x the pixels, 1/3rd the speed, 38400/(256*64) = ~2fps.

There's an old thread on the BBS somewhere about a single-chip ethernet-to-serial-and-pio processor module..

here

Ohh. The Dalsemi TINI is good but they've got supply problems. It's been listed as having a 12 week lead time for ages now. When they first came out, they couldn't even supply enough to fulfill the eval kits.

If you don't mind it not being Java based, the Rabbit modules are pretty good.

I don't know Java, and this thing seems to have a C compiler.
Bonus.

Of course it looks like the Rabbit boards cost a bit more, making it less of a throwaway (in the dash) device.

If you're comparing them based on RAM size then yeah, the Rabbit's are more expensive for what you get.
The RCM3710 or RCM2200 both have $49 modules which would do fine.

I found this ttl to ethernet interface. Don't know if it would be of any use. It's the NPort Express Module DE-311M. Don't know the cost however. It has TTL and supports LINUX drivers.

http://www.scientificdevices.com/moxa.htm

$129 here

The RCM3710 or RCM2200 both have $49 modules which would do fine.

The TINI SDK is free for e.g. me. It looks like I'd need Rabbit's dev kit, which is basically the additional cost of 5 modules. Unless I'm missing something, it's only affordable if I don't want to actually run any code on it.

Ahh okay. I wasn't including the price of the dev kit, just the modules themselves.
If you want to go for the cheapest startup route then you can use an AVR microprocessor, ISA NIC like the RTL8019, AVR GCC for the compiler and uIP for the TCP/IP stack. The programming cable is reasonably easy to make or you can buy them for about $50.

If all this sounds a hassle then you can buy the boards from EDTP. There is source code on there as well which will help you interface the NIC chip to the microcontroller.

I've been looking into this stuff recently as I'm designing an ethernet gateway for a company. It's using a Cypress PSoC CPU however so it's a bit of squeeze on RAM.

Ahh okay. I wasn't including the price of the dev kit, just the modules themselves.

I have 2 cars. Assuming I build 2x as many as I need, I haven't amortized the cost usefully.

It's probably all more work than I have time for now anyway.

Still seems like the cheapest overall solution and most practical is to find some old 486 Single-board computers with ethernet. Anybody have a pile of those somewhere or know where we could find some?

I'm sorry but I have absolutely no clue what you guys are working on here. Is this some way to extend the display using TTY -> ethernet converters?

They are trying to make a remote display so the empeg can be mounted in a glove box or under a seat and still be controlled.

Some (probably adequate) control.. the stalk doesn't provide full functional replication of the fascia controls. I don't think I'm conveying just how cool this joystick is I find it far easier to use than the 4 separate buttons on the Empeg...

I don't disagree. But it's a solved problem. Remote, stalk, custom rotary encoder...

Good luck with that (really), it's definitely an interesting idea but I don't see that being very practical. Speed on the serial connection is only a problem because I've made it one for myself by picking a big high-res display that's annoyingly low speed. There's a 140x32 module (7000-series) about the same size as the Empeg's that runs at 115.2kbps... 115200/(140*32) = ~25fps with the simplest (and least efficient) drawing method you could think of, "10: blast the entire 140x32px bitmap out to the display; 20: goto 10;". I picked a 256x64 that runs at 38.4.. 4x the pixels, 1/3rd the speed, 38400/(256*64) = ~2fps.

Well, I don't disagree. But he really asked for video out, not an external display. If there's some sort of serial -> composite video converter out there, I sure havn't found it. Seeing as an ethernet -> composite video adapter exists, it seems like a more likely option. I don't actually need video out, so this is all academic for me. Find a empeg compatible h.323 implemenation, and you've got video out.

Matthew

If you want a Serial to Composite Video convertor, such devices do exist and to find out more either:
do a search on this BBS looking for "Decade Engineering" or the "BOB II"
or visit This Link for details on their products.

With some software on the Empeg you could easily get a remote display of Track Info etc. You won't get the Video display e.g. visuals or Menu Overlays, but its a start.

The only problem is that the app runs as just another application, so the Player can take all the CPU time and starve it whenever it wants. This usually happens when it spins up the disks, which is usually you're pushing buttons. Then keypresses get queued up in the serial buffer and when the app gets processor time again the actions all get blasted out. It should be possible to give it the same priority as the Player since the button listener app needs virtually no processor time to check for input every once in a long (to the CPU) while, but I don't know how to go about doing that in a way that doesn't stick it in the kernel.. anybody?

Vincent, I was thinking about how you set up your control to empeg interface and how I'd like to set up mine. Is it possible to interface your basic stamp to the tuner serial port instead (inverted TTL) and have it feed this port psuedo-sony stalk packets instead of basic serial commands. This should prevent delayed controller commands and also completely free up the serial port for other uses. Since the empeg is remotely mounted anyway the tuner isn't needed (in most cases).

Is it possible to interface your basic stamp to the tuner serial port instead (inverted TTL) and have it feed this port psuedo-sony stalk packets instead of basic serial commands.

Sounds doable.. there's 2 +-12v pins on the basic stamp that are for normal serial, all the other 16 pins are 0-5 or possibly +-5. I'm not sure that it's entirely as flexible, I'm going to use some of the extra buttons I made to launch apps or toggle what's shown on the screen. Maybe stalk inputs could be ir_translated to fake codes that another application could intercept to do the same thing, that sounds reasonable enough.

This should prevent delayed controller commands and also completely free up the serial port for other uses.

I'm confident the delay can be solved by tweaking the priority, just haven't looked into it yet. I also have a display to drive, so it doesn't save a port unless you use the tuner's serial port for that too; that would be good for the k610a (it's TTL-level anyway), but I don't know if the 7000 or 9000-series (that use full +-12) will work.

Since the empeg is remotely mounted anyway the tuner isn't needed (in most cases).

If you had one before you probably still want it if you're moving the empeg to the trunk..