[Empeg-forsale] Re: WTB, a Rio Car/Empeg for about $375 or less.

[snoopstah@empegbbs-noreply.merlins.org]

In reply to:Firstly, the power section.
Well, an inverter doesn't cost that much... it's not elegant, but it could work.

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

In reply to:Hard drives.
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.

In reply to:Display.
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.

In reply to:Next you'll need to buy an IRMan for $50ish
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)

In reply to: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.
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.