9/15/2001

“I SHALL HAVE MP3s IN MY CAR” so sayith the geek in me and so be it. : ) I haven’t mentioned it on here before so I wanted to say that I am in the process of building a Mp3 player for my car. I actually have the hardware and software done, but I am stalled in building the box to keep it in. I have pulled a couple sly manuevers in the endeavor to build this thing. In an attempt to not brreak anything in my car I thought long and hard on how to intigrate it into the machine without touching the wires in the car in any way. I fell upon a great scheme. I am going to use a DC -> AC power converter to power the machine. It will be plugged into the cigarette lighter to start with with some small plans to maybe (this is a big maybe) wire it directly into the power system, but since I know nothing about where the wires are in my car for now it will work through the lighter socket. I will then sent the signal from the soundcard to the radio via a RF sender which sends the signal on a radio station channel. Here I came across a problem, this unit also required power via the lighter socket. They make Y adapters for it but this would have made the connections uglier and also forced more wire running in the cockpit of the car. Thus I thought some more and wired the RF unit into the power supply from the computer, thus providing perfect power for it. So I am back to my one wire in the cockpit to the trunk. Next I tackled the problem of putting things like monitors and keyboards into the car. This has several disadvantages: more wires, takes up a lot of space, looks junky in the car, and requires a lot more power from the power converter. I bought a power converter capable of providing 165 watts normal usage and 200 peak. This is well under the usage of both monitor and computer. Thus I needed a new way to control it. I wanted to work with linux as the OS because I wanted to have the “scandisk”less filessytem and other features of it. So I built a stripped down Redhat machine with ext3 filesystems and started work on having it send data out the serial port which I was going to connect to my palm. In the process of finding a terminal emulator for the palm I found some software called Netstereo. This allowed you to run a JAVA server on your machine and connect to it with a client running on your palm to play mp3s. This sounded perfect for me. I spent about a week messing with it and in the end I found out two key things, Java sucks for anything but web applications and two if software is in version 0.2 that is usually for a reason. I had to install 200megs of JAVA crap on my machine to get the server to run and palm client never worked right, plus the two never really talked correctly either. So in an attempt to find some way to fix these problems I stumbled on a program called GiantDisc. This thing is impressive. Using mysql in the backend it keeps a searchable database of all your mp3s and allows you to view them via a palm and build playlists and all kinds a stuff. Hit their site for full details it is truely awesome. Anyway I got this installed and after only a few minor glitches it works like a kid in Kathy Gifford’s clothes shops (yeah yeah I know tasteless and all but hey I am in that kinda mood). Another problem I am going to try to solve is the one of a spinning hard drive in a bouncy car. I hope to solve this by mounting the hard drive hanging from the top and bottom of the box it is in. I will hang it with rubber band to provide a poor mans suspension system. Also with this 0.2 version (yeah I know what I said earlier but this version will rock : ) ) I am using an old crappy hard drive so if it gets crashed no real loss. For those that care (you know who you are) the machine’s name is “famine” and the systems name will be … wait for it .. Deluge. Yes that is right, what is the name all you kiddies will be screaming when you go to buy a car? Deluge. Now I bet you are going to ask me why aren’t you? Well just because I am the kinda guy that helps at traffic accidents here you go. The stereo in my car is a monsoon stereo (I love it. They are great. I highly recommend one if you get the chance). The system will “flood” you with musical selection. Plus a winding path through dictionary.com got me to it and I thought it sounded cool, so bite me it is my project. : ) Anyway I hope to show it off at the linux meeting this Tuesday, may not have the box done yet though.