Awesome work. Nice to see activity here. I found an unused cage the other night in my collection of old gear and decided to check out the BBS again. Glad I did!

Yes, but it's been more than a year since the last update on this project. My guess is it's not going to happen anymore...

Today I read about this new HiFiBerry DAC for Raspberry Pi B+ units. I immediately started thinking how this would be an excellent addition to this project, since Patrick once said that Jon had made great software, but the downside was that the audio out quality of a RPi was a lot worse than the audio out of the Empeg. With this add-on, this problem is fixed.

I would really, really, really, really like to see this project by Jon getting released! Anybody got any news on it?

Cool. I have my rPi ready .

yeah, guess i need to get another DAC; the one i have (i was building an airplay target) is fine, but the hifiberry looks better.

of course i then built an airplay target from an old iphone with a broken display (but a good touch sensor)

Replying to myself here. This week they released the Raspberry Pi 2. Completely backwards compatible with the first Pi, but now using a Quad core CPU @ 900 Mhz instead of single core @ 700 Mhz. It's supposed to be at least 6 times faster compared to the original Pi, and yet is remains very energy efficient and is still only $35. This would probably be a perfect kit for Jon's project.

If only he would give us an update...

Me just came back after a LOOOOOOOOOOONG break

Story.... Denmark will cut FM next year or one year after...
Most will just go to the STEALER and get something fitted, maybe an addon that just passes the DAB to FM... some might get an new head unit...

But in either way the price will be far more than an DIY thing will cost....

So my thought was why not turn this in to an open source project? I'm not good with programming but doing hardware i can... and a bit of planning also...

But yes... is Jon still around? and if so does he like the idea?

Of course he have spent some time and money on this and its only fair that the investment is returned, so it might not be complete open source but then something that comes close?

EDIT: The HIFI Berry seems like a well suited ways for doing audio out, wonder if there are a similar DAB module for us europeans...

Q: the display patrick made for Jon is that Jon's property or can others have one?

EDIT2: This might be a suitble route for a radio module in europe: http://www.monkeyboard.org/products/85-d...pment-board-pro

has to be slimmed down but it has eagle files so should not be an issue...

data sheet:
http://d1jy6p8pks3hof.cloudfront.net/dat..._I_20130527.pdf

EDIT3: This audio lib. has support for many formats, i have even under widnows been able to play stuff with DRM.... not sure how that happened but it was an album from itunes store... and no i tunes was not installed on the pc... http://www.un4seen.com/bass.html

EDIT4: design files for the Pi compute module IO board... http://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/computemodule/designfiles.md

anyone thinks that a "new" empeg player would do well enough today?

what i had in mind was to opensource it... or do a kind of kickstarter thing...

maybe do it kit form or whatever....


but if the site is still alive let me know...

Personally, I doubt there's a market for an in-dash device - folks with music libraries keep them on their phones now, and just plug the phone into the car. And car dashes are too tough to work with.

Is there way to port the empeg functionality to android or ios and manage a device's music library? That could be fun. I have an ios, and the built-in player is awful.

-jk

you are prob. right.... now we just need an app for either Ios or android that can catch DAB radio and play it

for music i have learned to use whats in the iphone... so would not be bothered with another app for the same job.

i only came up with this as it seems fairly doable... dashes are not that hard to work with... for most cars you can get a kit that convert their custom cutout to either single din or double din cutout... from there its pretty easy...

the only trouble is that DIN is not the same all over the world even thou it should be if you know what the 3 letters stand for

It's a lot more than just the physical dash these days

Steering wheel controls
Amps that are simply not line level inputs from the dash
Bluetooth integration to dash unit
Climate control, navigation etc integration with dash unit

i just want a decent ui integrated to play onboard music. of course, currently i am using a custom iOS app which loads a javascript page that scrapes a web site and queues videos on youtube, so. i am probably disqualified.

Can you scrape an empeg? That could work...

-jk

That, is the basis of Hijack: screen-scraping and then intercepting (hijacking) the buttons.

Does anybody know if this project will ever see the light of day for the normal user? It's been more than two years now since Jon's last post. Since the RPi is now at version 3, which is a lot faster than the original one, I'm guessing a lot of cool stuff could be done with it... but I doubt it's ever going to happen. At least I'm not holding my breath. Does anybody have an update on this ? (Patrick maybe?)

meh - I've come to the conclusion about things like this that if it's not open source then I'm not interested.

It's too easy for things that become important to you to fade away.

Now if Jon had opened it up on github 2 years ago where might we be today?

What's even worse (and I find really annoying) is that his loudly announced progress probably put off other people who may have also begun working on the problem.

Huh? Jon posted the source on sourceforge. The centro_player*.tar.gz contains the new player code, and 3rd-party libs, cross-compiled. The src_v0.61.tar.gz file contains a drop-in replacement for the player code in the previous tarball, which is at 0.59. It's been available for almost three years, now.


Probably the same place we are now, since when he first posted, he got very few downloads, and very few people who actually tested it.


That's a pretty big hypothetical. Unless you're talking about yourself, I'm pretty skeptical that anyone was actually working on something similar. There's been talk about writing an open-source player for years and years, and, IIRC, only one other person has actually come through with anything, and it was no-where near as sophisticated as Jon's player. The idea hasn't exactly attracted what few developers remain in our dwindling membership numbers.

He even GPL licensed it.

oh, definitely my bad then

I've seen too many "ooh look what I did" projects where the promises to share it never seem to pan out and I really recalled this being one of them.

I'm really sorry for the aspersions Jon