Musicbox about to go live

I hooked my musicbox up in my car last night, just temporarily to test it with the el cheapo DC->AC power inverter that I bought... and it runs!!  Even with the car off.  It doesn’t survive ignition, however, but I didn’t expect it to; at ignition, the car’s "12 volt" power line dips to more like 10 or even 9 volts.  So, that resets the unit.  But no big deal, and even the DC->DC power supply that I would have built would suffer from that problem.

So... woohoo!  This guy is ready to rock.  I wrote some code to randomize the music, so now when I press the "\" key, it plays a randomly-chosen album (out of the ~300 on the hard drive).  And when I press the "/" key, it creates a playlist of 100 randomly-chosen songs from all albums.  It’s so sweet.

I found out that I can send the audio signal into my head unit via the CD changer plug [which I’m not using (obviously, now  : )  ], so that makes life easier, because I can use the head unit’s volume control to control the musicbox’s volume.  All I need to do is buy the $18 cable from Kenwood, which just "converts" the 13-pin DIN CD changer plug into 2 RCA plugs.  Which means, of course, that 2 of those 13 pins are the left and right audio channels, one is the audio ground, and 1 or 2 are used to tell the head unit that there’s a CD changer present.  And that means... I don’t need no steekin’ $18 cable, I can hack it myself.  Go engineering!

Looking at the current competition in the car mp3 market, we have:

The Sony MEX-1HD.  10 gigabyte hard drive.  So going with an average of 75 megabytes per album, you can fit 133 albums into this guy.  But you can’t just copy them from your existing mp3 collection.  You have to rip each CD through the head unit onto its internal hard drive.  At 8x speed (= insanely slow).  And the display is tiny and cluttered.  For $1500.  Well, at least it’s cool looking.

Then there’s the Neo Car Jukebox.  This thing is pretty cool.  It has an internal hard drive too, and you can choose the size: 20 gig for $380, 40 for $440, and 80 for $500.  But it doesn’t mount in your dash like a normal stereo; instead it mounts under a seat like an amp, and it has a wired remote display / controller that you stick on the dash somewhere.  So that’s sort of tacky and weird, and it’s a small display too.

For both of those, you have to scroll through your music collection to find the band you want to listen to.  Scrolling on a display with 3 or 4 lines is a painful experience.  I think this is the biggest strength of my design.  Although you can scroll it just like those others, you can also go directly to the band you want just by typing 2 or 3 letters of the band’s name.  Type b e and you’re at Beastie Boys.

Most people’s initial reaction to this is "typing while driving???  that is so dangerous!!"  Well, it’s not typing as in typing your tax return.  It’s hitting 3 keys, for goodness’ sakes.  You need to have your eyes off the road for much longer in order to scroll through 100 or 200 or 300 bands, than to hit 3 keys.

Having a keyboard in your car also seems sorta annoying... I wasn’t sure how to get around this until I happened across this Gyration keyboard one day.  It’s small and thin and light, it’s wireless (radio) so you don’t have to point it or mess with wires, and it’s slick looking because it’s black.

And my display is big -- 4x40 characters -- and it fits right in the dash like a head unit.  So as far as looks, my setup is looking pretty nice.  And it was way cheaper than the Sony unit above, and even a little cheaper than the Neo.  $100 for the keyboard (which came with a mouse that I didn’t want, and a mouse charger, so it should be much cheaper), $120 for a 40 gigabyte hard drive, about $70 for an old computer, $30 for the LCD screen, and $0 for all the free software that I used/wrote for it.  So just over $300, and probably more like $270 once Gyration starts selling the keyboard separately from the mouse and charger.

Oh, one last thing... and this completely blows everything else out of the water... once I manage to set up wireless networking in Linux, my musicbox will have mobile wireless internet access  : )  Now, I won’t be web-browsing too much on a 4x40 screen (although some pages like stock scripts and news tickers... and come to think of it, blogs... would be perfectly do-able) but email and instant messaging will surely be in full effect.