Here is a picture of the TV output I made. I used the serial timecodes and song info to feed my display program. I don't have color operational because I haven't made a circuit board that supports it yet.

I will be adding a pass through on the signal outputs so it can have a spectrum analyzer display on the lower half of the screen.

Alex Lear

cool !

that would be good for all the people who wanted to mount the empeg in the trunk and use a seperate display

32Gig MK2 In 2001 VW Golf TDI

that would be good for all the people who wanted to mount the empeg in the trunk and use a seperate display

Except you still wouldn't get on-screen feedback of what you were doing in the menus. You couldn't, for example, adjust the settings in the Sound menu with that display. It only takes the song info from the serial port and runs it through a video character generator.

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Tony Fabris

thats true but it's better than the options they had before

32Gig MK2 In 2001 VW Golf TDI

Except you still wouldn't get on-screen feedback of what you were doing in the menus. You couldn't, for example, adjust the settings in the Sound menu with that display. It only takes the song info from the serial port and runs it through a video character generator.

I played around for a while with trying to determine where you are in the menus by monitoring the button/remote codes in the kernel, i.e. by dead reckoning. In theory, this would allow you to construct your own versions of the menus with external logic. Unfortunately, it turned out to be difficult - the behaviour of the menus seems to depend on the timing of the button presses. E.g. turning the knob quickly results in the menus skipping ahead more positions that the number of codes passing through the kernel.

Borislav

Wow... I mean... come on... people can't be that keen can they... like, wow... crazy stuff man! Now make some to sell to all of us empeggers!

#170... I got SN: 080000101 12 gig Blue!

Has this project progressed yet? I would like to get one if you are making them, or build one myself if you are passing out the design.

What kind of output are we talking here? Standard rca video jack? Or is it RF?

I have my Empeg installed along with my Alpine CVA-1005. When I switch over to the Empeg the screen is black. This would be a really cool feature to have it display what is playing.

The solution to the unpredictableness is to just intercept all button presses, and spoon feed them to the player at your own whim. This makes player state tracking much easier (except when the player crashes.. maybe just a v200b3 issue). And by hijacking the empeg display, one could insert whatever interface we like, and just feed the player commands as we please..

The project hasn't gone anywhere mainly because of the little amount of information I can get from the serial port. I started an FPGA design that would intercept the VFD signals and change them to a vga output. Got half done when the player EOL was announced. I ditched the project fast for fear that I would destroy the VFD driver circuit and not be able to get replacements parts. As for the output of this design, it is a standard video output. I also use it with my alpine cva-1005. I'll try to post some pictures or even better yet the whole design. This design will not work with version 2.0 player software because you have to remove the "notify=1" option in the config file which supplies the song information.

Would be interesting to see a FPGA to do this. It's hard to break the outputs on the connector as long as you treat them right (ie: they're 3.3v outputs. Don't put anything back down them, use an inline resistor - eg 1k - just in case).

Hugo

any new or improvments on this? or information to0 just get the basic one working.. thanks

Heres a possible suggestion.
Following on from someone who pointed their consumer Video camera at their empeg in their hi-fi stack over Xmas last year and used their TV as the display device.

Why not get one of those cheap(ish) Video cameras [I mean those ultra-small pin-hole type cameras that have a composite video output].
then mount it in front of the Empegs display so it can see the whole VFD display [in focus] then route that composite video signal into your regular 'small portable TV' with Comp. video input and/or your in-dash video display unit that we all have in our cars these days :-)))

This would solve the need to do major hacking on the display boards, would be easy to remove and would allow you to mount your empeg where the sun don't shine [e.g. your trunk].

For control you have a few choices:

1. IR remote extender to get your existing/steering wheel Ir signals to your empeg.

2. Some kind of wired or wireless remote on the serial port

3. A Sony Stalk (if you have a Tuner module).

Well, Hijack serve(d) up a PNG image of the display over the web server, so there is a way to capture the display. Perhaps that output could be directed to the serial port and then read in? That would avoid having to modify the actual display board. It would seem(from the perpective of someone who's never looked at the code) that it would even be possible write a program that would read the display and output it to the serial port fairly simply without even messing with the kernel. The speed might not be great, but speed is only really necessary for the eye candy.

Sorry if i'm off base here, I'm more just throwing this out as an idea, but it's 3 in the morning so I might regret it later...

ya.. im not too hot on the video camera idae.. it just seems kinda cheasy and lame.. now you might be onto something with that hijack.. ill look into that more... another thing ive been considering is having lower end laptop with videoout serve as a host, so that on my screen in the car can have AVS visual in full color that go with the music on the empeg/rio.. so then i wont complain so much about the visuals situation on the player that toby loves for me to do so very much becuase i know the toby will read this since i did say visual.. i wont need it to display anything but the visual and have the empeg as the Info screen for what songs playing and what not..

Yeah, a video camera is not the way to go... How about one of the matrix-orbital serial displays? It seems compleetly backwards considering we bought the empeg to avoid home-building an mp3 player ourselves. But I guess tha'ts off topic, because the orginal question was how to do TV out, not a seperate display.

I can't think of anything less complex than adding a laptop to grab the screen from hijack, but that's opening the exact can of worms the empeg was trying to keep shut.

nope its not to grab the display of the empeg.. its so i can use the lapyop as a host to run full color visuals via winamp's avs

So does that have any relation to the TV out question we started with? I'm not saying it's a bad idea... If you're putting in a screen, winamp visiuals would be a great addon... Besides, a cheap laptop could play DVDs and plenty of video game emulators... Heck, it could play mp3s...

ya.. but the empeg is nicer for playing mp3s.. becuase thats all its made to do i might use it for video game emulator too, but i ordered a really nice lcd screen that can support 800x600 so it will look clean to run windoze in, i might run linux on there once winamp3 comes out of beta.. and now that i think of it no it really dosnt have aything to do with tv out, cept it would be nice to have it as an option

There's a graphical Unix mp3 player called XMMS that's identical to WinAmp, if waiting on such a thing to appear on Linux is your holdup.

im accully looking for a visual server.. similar to the avs, that accpet line-in for the visual..

In Winamp, you can "play location" from linein://

Tom

yup i knwo this thanks

There's a graphical Unix mp3 player called XMMS that's identical to WinAmp, if waiting on such a thing to appear on Linux is your holdup.

I can't speak for Justin, but for my money Winamp isn't the issue. Geiss is the issue...

Peter

I can understand that....