About

Project to design and build a Free/Open hardware audio player and recorder, for use with RockBox.

Objectives

• Make a good quality hardware audio player and recorder;
• Find a company to assembly and sell It online, to worldwide (already received some offers);
• Total cost less than $125.

Advantages from commercial players

• All hardware documented - perfect Rockbox port and support!;
• Control on hardware quality - will result in a good audio quality, longer battery duration, etc;
• Simpler because there will be no need to include DRM in the system;
• Great to share music, no restrictions imposed on hardware nor in software!;
• Free/Open Software build and debug tools;
• Long life, will not be discontinued from production.

Disadvantages from commercial players

• Expensive;
• Not very attractive design.

Nowadays fast microcontrollers and memory are cheap. Microcontrollers tend to be very fast, with a lot of resources inside like DAC and USB peripherals. This level of integration makes it possible to build a cheap and powerful digital audio player with few components, but comes with difficulties for DIY electronics like very small pins of microcontroller and ICs (which makes DIY soldering almost impossible) and expensive printed circuit boards.

Tendency of gadgets is to have video capabilities, fancy features as touch screen, etc, and this will makes systems complex, energy-hungry and not good for the tasks of an audio player/recorder. This project intends to build, to focus, on a powerful digital audio player and recorder.

There is an archive of messages, with wishes of functionalities: RockboxPlayerWishlist.

License

If you use this work, you must reference this project as "Rockbox Player" and use this link: http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/RockboxPlayer

Status of the project

• Forum thread about the RockboxPlayerPrototype;
• Forum thread about the RockboxPlayerV1;

We had contacted Olimex on 11 January 2008 and they will be possible interested in make, assembly and sell on their online shop, the RockboxPlayer.

We had contacted and received on 26 January 2008, a positive answer from www.in-circuit.de, to produce the RockboxPlayer.

On 30 March 2008, Pasen, a company that sells MP3 and MP4 players, contacted us in the forum saying "... we are really interested in producing your players. It's long time we wanted to build an open source player, but being relatively small we can't invest much on it, and thus we are glad to hear of your project."

Future

• Olimex build and sell a MOD-MP3 MP3 PLAYER MODULE WITH VS1002 MP3 DECODER/ENCODER.
• www.in-circuit.de.
• Makezine - they sell various DIY Kits, they sell the Daisy MP3 Player DIY kit.

Planed versions

RockboxPlayerPrototype

RockboxPlayerPrototypeB

RockboxPlayerV1

We are actually defining the features to include in the hardware.

Links

• Open Hardware Foundation
• Free Software Foundation

Links to others players Free/Open Source players

• DSPdap - Without display and using a Texas DSP (without Free/Open tools to build and debug). The author of DSPDap is now working on RockboxPlayer and much parts of DSPDap will be reused.
• MP3 Development Board from SparkFun - ARM7, VS1002 - MP3 audio codec, 128x128 colour LCD, microSD, FM Transmitter, Lithium Polymer battery and accelerometer.
• ARM MP3/AAC Player - Almost equal idea, no display.
• Yet Another MP3 Player
• AVR Butterfly MP3
• PJRC High Capacity MP3 Player
• microsyl MP3 player
• megaPEG
• MoP3
• EchoMp3
• ...

Interesting links

• About other Free/Open hardware -- Building a BlackfinOne, debug hardware, soldering tips, u-boot, etc
• ...

People that are interested and can help

• JorgePinto aka Casainho on forum and IRC. Developer since the beginning of the project. EXPERIENCE: I work in a small company that develops simple electronics circuits with LEDs and AVR 8 bits. I CAN HELP IN: I have some limited knowledge in analog electronics and in GCC-AVR for 8 bits, I will be able to do some drivers for hardware. MOTIVATION: I would like to have a fully Free/Open hardware player for RockBox, without DRM; I would like to have a player for quick and simple share music files with my friends; I want to learn working with 32 bits systems with GCC.
• RogerQuadros - I created the DSPdap. I can contribute my hardware and firmware design skills into the Rockbox hardware player.