Ack! (shudder)

Maybe ClemsonJeep should hunt this guy down and show him a REAL mp3 player.

Bill B.
Mk.2 SN 080000183 - 18 GB / Green

I'm probably setting myself up for a real flame job here (...pauses to don asbestos underwear...) but I think what he did was actually pretty neat.

Think about it -- he has a workable audio player capable of playing over 100 hours of music, easily upgradable to more if he wants, built at essentially no cost out of obsolete bits and pieces found in his garage.

Is it as good as an empeg? No. Does it have the music management software the empeg has? Of course not. Is it a geeky toy that will impress everybody like the empeg? No.

But... will it play lots of music at about 10% of the cost of an empeg? Damn right it will! My hat's off to this guy!

tanstaafl.



"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

I agree that he did something pretty nifty in terms of pure hack value. That's not what I was laughing about.

I was laughing at his claim that it was the first one meant for off-road use. By my calculations, we've had 4-wheeler Empeg owners for quite a while longer than he's had his system working. And the Empeg uses a genuine set of shock mounts instead of a couple of pieces of foam rubber.

Oh, and we have a bunch of those Dell Optiplexes where I work. here's a story about them. The owner of that Jeep system has swapped the hard disk and the floppy disk drive to make room for the foam shock mount.

___________
Tony Fabris

...Do you want to see this done right? check this one out.
-mark


...proud to have owned one of the first Mark I units

Maybe ClemsonJeep should hunt this guy down and show him a REAL mp3 player.

Are you sure that it isn't him. The site is hosted by clemson.edu!!!

Anyway, don't laugh too hard because I had this same system in my 4runner running on a 486 gateway computer over 3 years ago. I thought I was pretty cool with 50 songs on my 250MB drive. That's how I got interested in Hugo's project.

Alex Lear

Oh, sure, but if you really wanted to do it right, you could make the whole thing fit into a DIN sized case, maybe use a more powerful processor (maybe one of the ARM things?) and set it up with a hierarchical playlist system and a larger hard drive.... why, it might be possible to put as much as 600 hours of music into one of these things!

Seriously, what I liked about this guy's setup was that he cobbled it together out of mostly spare parts, nothing fancy, and it has adequate functionality. I mean, Hugo's original effort wasn't a whole lot more than that, was it?

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

Tsk, mine was invisible (no PC strapped anywhere), had custom player software, a PIC doing keypad scan and controlling the automatic shutdown process and had a homebuilt DC-DC converter (no inverter needed). And a 2.5" disk.

Same concept, but I know how to solder & code. For someone who doesn't, the jeep project is pretty much as far as you can go.

Hugo

You should have mentioned what it was you found so amusing. I looked at his site and I couldn't figure which part you found amusing.

Calvin

You should have mentioned what it was you found so amusing. I looked at his site and I couldn't figure which part you found amusing.

I just said... it was his claim at the top of the page:

"The first MP3 player MEANT to go off road!"

That's all.

___________
Tony Fabris

Well I know that *now* -- but when you first made your original post (see your original post) I was left scratching my head.

Calvin