The New Frontier

[judb]

Okay, who wants to see if we can hax0r a phatnoise home player?

[SteveC]

To do what? Work? That'll be a challenge.

[judb]

To do what? Work? That'll be a challenge.

Well, that was sort of the idea.  however after I posted that I realized that phatnoise has removed the product from the product page.. i think its not for sale at all anymore and I don't own one so maybe this is a bad idea.

I guess we can see about the new GM player when its available.  Anyone want to buy us some new GM cars?

[judb]

Okay, my other thought is to build a CD that does everything for the DMS hack, you know, copy the files to make a playlist and a player for executing the scripts, then another option that copies the first meg of the DMS to a ramdisk along with the contents of the phtsys partition, then promts the user for the DMS swap to happen and the new disk to have the first 1 meg written to it then properly partiitoned and formated, then the phtsys data dumped back and the scripts for flashing removed... just a thought.

Whos up for working on that project?

[RobM]

I can help with a bootable Linux CD.  I've got VMware which makes this sort of thing easy.

I was looking into somehow adding USB or WiFi into the PhatBox but that doesn't look that practical right now.  For the boards with the spare flash spot we could use that for a peripheral bus, but my board doesn't have that, so there's no way I'm going to be working on that front.  The IDE bus is a better way, but you can't just plug a CompactFlash I/O device in because it doesn't expect to get accessed in True ATA mode as a slave; we'd need to make some sort of adapter to make an IDE to CF/PCMCIA bridge, and even then I'm not sure about interrupt generation from there.  The serial port in the ARM maxes out at 115kbps, so that's obviously not enough for doing a wireless sync of any sort.  I don't believe JTAG is of any use for that, either.

Are there any pins on the back connector that are connected through to the ARM CPU?

Oh, how I would love to have an expansion connector on the ARM data bus.  I'd have WiFi up and running within a week if that were the case!

[judb]

As for the hardware mod option, with this particualr SOC setup that they have, I don't think we'll be able to do much hardware modification.  We'd have to look into building new boards with componets we could use and just reuse the phatnoise software.. which would be cost prohibitive and likley illegal ...

I don't see any pins that would be in a position to help us out.  Theres one GPIO pin that I found in the serial interface connector that might be useable for something else.. but its just one pin.

[RobM]

I was thinking about it and the serial interface at 115.2k would be enough to sync something like low-bitrate news shows at night.

I found a module (Digi Connect Wi-ME) that looks like it would work with minimal external components, and runs about $130 in single quantities.

It should wire directly to the serial port; the addition of a small microcontroller to power things up periodically and check for updates, plus some software on the PhatBox would be all that'd be needed...