Like the subject says. Anyone willing to help me out?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA LOL

...er, yeah, um...i'll keep an eye out...

Nothing wrong with that, Im not going to pay the sky high prices some ppl are asking for there units, 375 to 400 is only fair at this point IMHO

Yup. I agree. no matter how good the unit is, i can build a micro ATX form factor PC to use for 500+. That is just getting rediculous. Hell, with the PC I could add in DVDs and such.

do you read slashdot by any chance? You sound just like them. Ridiculous? Most of us paid 1200+ for our units.

Sean

Yeah, tell me about it...

Be our guest. We won't stop you.

But you are ignoring some important elements of the empeg.

a) Firstly, the power section. You may have noticed that cars run on 12V DC. Most motherboards require -12V, +3.3V, +5V and +12V, which dictates a standard PC PSU. Which in turn will dictate an inverter. Yes, you can buy a small embedded motherboard that will run from purely 12V, but these will set you back about $400 anyway if bought new. You will then need to hack together some circuitry and software to boot the unit, and to shut it down when required. I'll give you a free hint - look at using UPS softare and the serial port.
b) Hard drives. You may have noticed that the empeg uses laptop drives that are shock mounted. These are significantly more expensive than desktop drives. Yes, you could use standard 3.5 drives, but they will consume more power, and be less resilient to shock.
c) Display. There is basically only one type of LCD display that has the wide viewing angle needed. It's not cheap, and good luck finding one less than 8 inches diagonal. If you use a vfd, you are looking at over $100 for anything graphical. And then the costs of interfacing it, and developing the software to drive it.
d) Next you'll need to buy an IRMan for $50ish and a clunky universal remote so that you can control your unit in an easy manner.
e) Presuming you want your unit to boot up in under 10 seconds, you will need to get a motherboard that allows flash to be used. This pretty much confines you to the expensive embedded boards.
f) I assume that since cost is a prime concern that you wont be using one of Micro$oft'$ 'operating' systems. That is a good thing anyway, linux is far more suited to the task. Look for a project called Route66 on the web for helpful information. But you will still need to configure most of the software yourself.

But, at least you'll be able to watch DVDs on your long drives. Just let me know where you are so I can avoid being hit.

I'd say all that stuff can be overcome. Fact is, home brew solutions are not the right tool for the job because - in every case I've seen - the software is just not up to it. You can install the greatest music management and playback application ever written, but it's not going to have the right package of features for your dash. Unfortunately most geeks are sceptical of this until they experience it for themselves.

Rob

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Firstly, the power section.

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Well, an inverter doesn't cost that much... it's not elegant, but it could work.

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I'll give you a free hint - look at using UPS softare and the serial port.

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UPS is totally over the top... car systems supply permanent and switched supplies... just power it off the permanent, and hook up a simple circuit to the serial port for when the switched supply goes off, triggering a shutdown. Works in all cases except someone disconnecting the battery when the unit is on.

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Hard drives.

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Cost of laptop drives isn't really a valid point, as a 10gig drive can be picked up pretty cheap, and anything bigger hits the empeg owner as much as it does the home-build owner.

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Display.

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Again, I might disagree here.. Of course, it depends on what you want to do, but a simple text display can be had for pretty cheap (see crystalfontz.com and matrixorbital.com for examples) and is plenty wide-angled enough - you don't need much more than 50 degrees horizontally, and most LCDs are vertically limited, not horizontally.

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Next you'll need to buy an IRMan for $50ish

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Or use the onboard PC irda header that virtually all motherboards have, along with suitable software, and any remote you want (i.e. the kenwood model sold with early empegs)

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Presuming you want your unit to boot up in under 10 seconds, you will need to get a motherboard that allows flash to be used.

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I imagine some kind of standby mode could be used that would resume in a short amount of time (10-15 secs, maybe) and would be capable of being run off the car battery for a few days without problems.

Not that I'm knocking the empeg at all - there's no way you could build a system as good as the empeg from off-the-shelf componentry. And you'd still have to write a *lot* of software. But it's too easy to knock the home-brew people too much - don't forget that the empeg concept started out like that. These problems can, on the whole, be solved, to some degree at least.

I would strongly disagree that you'd have a unit anything like as integrated and easy-to-use as the empeg, though. But maybe some people don't need that. I was personally looking at building a system like this from an old laptop - not because I thought it'd be ever anywhere NEAR the empeg in terms of quality, features, and downright WOWness, but because at the time, there was no way I could afford an empeg.

Of course, it's significantly easier to say 'I could build a unit that could do all that and play DVDs for $500'. To build it, within the budget, and sit down and write all the software needed to make it work, is a much harder task.

A.

Unfortunately most geeks are sceptical of this until they experience it for themselves.
Yes. I know this all too well. In case anyone hasn't seen my attempt at a car MP3 player... feast your eyes:
http://www.spmicro.com/mp3sidekick/

Incidentally... (replying to my own post, but hey, I need to get my post count up )

There's a veritable plethora of *very* nice TFT screens that take a composite TV input coming onto the market at very reasonable prices - I've seen some widescreen 7inch models for about $199 with excellent viewing angles and very crisp displays. Would put you over the budget without a doubt, but just imagine the visuals you could get with one of those.

Cheers,

A.

But it's too easy to knock the home-brew people too much - don't forget that the empeg concept started out like that. These problems can, on the whole, be solved, to some degree at least.


I wasn't trying to knock the homebrew crowd. I very nearly went down that path myself as I couldn't afford the empeg. But then when the fire-sale happened, I didn't have a choice. There was absolutely no way that I could create anything so ......complete....for want of a better term, for that money. And the same is still true of the prices we are seeing today from carplayer.com.
But I was lucky, and I know it. I try to reclaim my karma with a bit of hijack hacking

I was trying to point out why the empeg is easily worth that amount, and some of the technical issues involved that would need to be addressed in any homebrew unit.

BTW, I wrote 'UPS software', not 'UPS'. My hint was that software already exists to cleanly shutdown a system based on the triggering of an existing line, and it was a pointer of where to look.

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Well, an inverter doesn't cost that much... it's not elegant, but it could work.

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For how long? On a long car trip (in a rental, sadly, no empeg) I had my laptop plugged into an inverter and was using GPS and about 15gb of USGS quad maps just for amusement. I left Pittsburgh at like 9:30am. Around 10pm I was in west-central Vermont, and some of the folks in the back of the van commented about "that fire smells good". I realized what it was, and pulled the molten plastic of the cigarette lighter plug out, and that was the end of that inverter. Oops.

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I very nearly went down that path myself as I couldn't afford the empeg. But then when the fire-sale happened, I didn't have a choice.

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You and me both!

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BTW, I wrote 'UPS software', not 'UPS'.

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Oh alright, I'll let you off.

Cheers,

A.

thats why I had to hardwire mine to the battery, both positive and negative, and put in line fuses, evn though its got 3 in its self, and even now on long trips using a laptop, it gets so hot it heats it almosts melts the plastic flooring it sits on