I was wondering if it would be possible to add a force home/ac mode option to the hijack in the same way we have for car? the reason for this is im going to be using my empeg in a docking station at home and will be using the car sled to do this - would be great to have it forced to home use (for EQ etc.)

Mark, this might go without saying, but if you implement this, it'd be nice if it were just one menu entry instead of two. Like "Select power mode" with the options "normal, force AC, force DC" or something like that. I think the number of menu entries is getting a little crazy. Any chance you'll start breaking some of these options into submenus? I realize it's not the most important thing on your plate but scrolling through the long list of menu options some of which I never use gets to be tedious.

Actually I just looked and it's pretty easy to comment out hijack menu entries in the kernel source. Maybe I'll just do that.

I am also going to be assembling a home docking station for the player, and I think I will hack the hardware slightly to allow automatic detection of the dock, perhaps by looping back a wire on the serial port or something.

Anyone got any suggestions, before I invent my own hack here?

I have already seen the "support the ac-adaptor plug" method (with photos!), but would prefer to save the wear and tear on that connector.

Cheers

-ml

Actually, I might use the MIC input as my dock-detection method, by just wiring a ???-ohm resistor across the wires from the sled. Nice, safe, and easily duplicated by others on the BBS.

??

Until they come out with VR, then you're going to want to use that Mic input.

>Until they come out with VR, then you're going to want to use that Mic input.

Oh good. In that case, it should be a VERY safe bet for me to use the MIC.
(I'm not expecting Empeg VR in my lifetime).

-ml

I like the MIC input suggestion! When VR does come around, you could change it to something else.. What about using the Telephone Mute line held to a specific value. I don't recall what triggers it, but perhaps it can sense a voltage level vs. a specific 1 or 0 state.

yea any of these suggestions sound good to me. I would also like to avoid the wear and tear on the power socket.

Oh goodie!

The cellphone mute input is even better, since it wouldn't normally have any use when on AC power.

Can somebody scrounge around the kernel source to find where this bit can be read.. I'm kinda busy right now with other Hijack priorities.

Thanks

-ml

Hi.

If you use the cellphone mute to detect AC/at-home operation, how will you differentiate in-car use with an active phone (at empeg startup) from at-home usage?

cu,
sven

I agree we will never see the VR on these units by empeg anyway. So lets use that.

But as a side note to this feature, I have more than one vehicle that I use the Empeg in. And the volume setting is different for each. In one vehicle it is the main head unit(only head unit) and the volume hence doesn't get onder 15 or so on the volume at max. While my second vehicle it is the secondary head unit with my Alpine CVA-1005 as the main. For the empeg to play at the same volume as the cd changer and the radio it must be cranked to 4-6 on the volume. When I swap the unit back and forth the volume is too loud in the first vehicle. I can't always remember to turn it down beforehand. So.... If there was a way to designate, via the mic input, what vehicle it was in for a volume setting and possibly other settings. This would solve the whole issue of where it's docked. Different resistor for let say 3 or 4 different docking modes, if we need that many.

Okay, so we're back to using the MIC input for sure.

So.. can you now dig around in the code to figure out how I can "read" the MIC input? That will save me a ton of time when I "get to" this feature next week.

And possibly even try/suggest some suitable resistor values (I'm a software geek.. I'd rather have a practising engineer type figure that stuff out for me)

Thanks

-ml

The mic input, being for audio, is AC coupled. Any static voltage (eg a resistor) won't be detectable.

Hugo

GPLR&EMPEG_SERIALDCD is phone mute, GPLR&EMPEG_SERIALCTS is light sense.

Hugo

(...intrigued, so he ventures out on a limb....)
Those are boolean values I assume? Or is there a way to measure analog levels on those inputs?

BTW: I was reading on /. about old bbs' when I came across this link and who do you suppose is the first name on the list, but our own Mr. Fiennes. I think I'd heard that bit of trivia somewhere, but wouldn't have been able to recall it. Boy, it is a small world when you're leaving foot prints around isn't it?

>The mic input, being for audio, is AC coupled.
>Any static voltage (eg a resistor) won't be detectable.

Will it pass 60HZ (or 50HZ for you islanders)?
Or possibly double those frequencies if I cobble some diodes together?

What sort of voltage .. 0-1V okay?

And where do I find it and how do I "read" it?

Thanks

Boolean, there's no A/D on these lines.

Yes, I wrote ARCbbs a looooooong while ago! Actually, many of us here were known in the acorn scene: I wrote ARCterm (all the versions, ie 3 (pd) 6 & 7 (commercial)), ARCbbs, the Telnet/rlogin client for the ANT internet suite, the server/user management tools for ANT multiuser suite, a very good 3270 emulator that got canned when the company went bust, the first soundtracker player on the ARM CPU, and some of the very first "scrolly" demos for the acorn.

Patrick did the 2 port serial cards for the acorn (I did the firmware), and we co-developed many of the acorn SCSI cards (me doing the firmware again). He also did the Graphics Enhancer for the acorn, a 56001 DSP card, and more strange stuff.

John Graley did a great acorn demo (!funkydance?) and probably a lot more stuff I don't know about...

Rob ran an Acorn BBS and did the PC keyboard interface box with Patrick, plus lots of other stuff...

Toby did a lot of acorn bits - some educational software, for example - plus lots of graphicsy things.

Peter wrote a lot of the ANT Fresco browser, and before, when he worked at Iota, did bits of Animator. Also known for his GIF optimisation/animation tools.

I'm sure I've missed a lot out, but those are the acorn links I know of. Mike was a QL user, so missed out on the rich vein of acornism ;)

Hugo

It should pass 50/60Hz, yes, but there's not a lot of that about in the car. 1v should be fine. Sampling frequency is up to 29kHz.

See empeg_cs4231a for more info.

Hugo

As Mark is look to detect when it is docked at home that shouldn't be a problem...

Is there a reason I have no idea what an Acorn is? Is it a platform that didn't catch on in the States or something?

Acorn are the company which made the BBC B computer in '81/'82. This box was the equivalent in the UK of the Apple ][ in the USA - expandable, solid, etc. The BBC B was much more advanced than the apple, but was made later on... it had multiprocessing options & lots of good stuff (second 6502 cpu, second z80, second 32016, second 68000, second ARM1-development-cpu). There are emulators available, and the games were arcade-quality for the time (unlike the apple ][!) - eg, Rocket raid (scramble), Snapper (pacman), Meteors (asteroids), etc. The BBC games scene produced Elite, which was well ahead of its time!

Acorn had networking done & dusted very early on, too. Back in 1980 you could buy fileservers (System III, I think) and clients (Acorn Atom) from them running Econet (about the same as Appletalk in terms of speed & wiring). Allegedly, Bill Gates came to see them back in the early 80's and they offered to show him their networking technology - his reply was (allegedly, again) "what's networking?"

For the followup, acorn looked at existing CPUs, didn't like any of them, and so invented the ARM CPU in-house. Silicon worked first time, and by '87 they were selling the Archimedes range of ARM2 based machines, having also designed the A/V chip, the IO controller and the memory controller. Lots of us in this office got our hands on ARM CPUs back in 1987 :)

ARMs got very sucessful, as you probably know. Almost every mobile phone has one, they had 77% of the risc market share in 2000 (cf mips 11%, hitachi sh 7%, power pc 3%, other 2%).

Acorn never managed to get the hang of marketing though; the products were good but a bit expensive and never mass market. Like Apple, they sold well into education until PCs just became unbeatable. Rumour has it that the ARM was almost used for Apples instead of PowerPC.

What was left of acorn spun-off a chip design part (element 14, which then got bought by Broadcom for megabucks) and the remaining machine design part got bought by Pace, who make set-top-boxes. Acorn at that point was worth rather a lot less than their share of ARM!

...and there the story ends. A lot of ARM is made up of ex-acorn bods, and it's almost impossible to go into a pub in cambridge without running into people who used to work for acorn.

Hugo

Hmm. In theory, you could make a VERY simple PIC board to connect to the tuner module port and report a device id of (say) 15 to indicate in-home. It could be done on a 12c508 with external crystal, only needing a voltage regulator and a few resistors.

Hugo

Very cool background, thanks. I have stumbled upon the Acorn name in my travels looking for ARM assembly code, etc. but didn't know the lineage. Yet another example of how bad marketing can doom a product that has a lot more potential than the competition.

Or, rather, how superior marketing can squash otherwise superior products.

Or, rather, how superior marketing can squash otherwise superior products.

Yep. Around here we call it the IBM principle.

IBM = Inferior, But Marketable.

(equalp MS "Marketable Shít")

Edit: Didn't notice that it censored me. Oddly, sometimes I can get out a shít and sometimes I can't.

God, I really need to cut down on the scatological references today. I'm really going overboard.

Tsk, how could you bring up the keyboard interface (let us never speak of it again) but not mention Noddy's Playtime

Rob

(equalp MS "Marketable [censored]")

Just doesn't have the same effect when the BBS censors you. :)

Jebus, I vaguely remember Noddy's Playtime. And I've long been familiar with the BBC and Archimedes, since I used to be heavily into the European computer scene for a North American resident. :)

Did the c64 and Amiga thing though, as expected. The Archimedes had stiff competition from the Amiga and Atari ST. Apple wasn't a factor for the Amiga with the Macintosh in the home, but surpassed everyone but the PC clones elsewhere. Apple's market has grown, thanks in part, to the demise of all these other machines.

I was looking through the BBS list linked earlier today. They're missing a few of the most popular c64 BBS programs - they were definitely used around the world, but they originated here in the Toronto area. One of my best friends (who I happen to work with now) actually was responsible for an assembly version of one of them. I also knew the original programmers and people in the companies that released the others. Not to mention the people behind a couple of the more popular Amiga systems. And the person who wrote a large bit about one of the big Amiga programs on the website used to live around the corner from me. I also managed to find out that one programmer, whom I had also met and whom my friend was one of the original beta testers for his BBS program, works for Microsoft and was the person behind the compression in their CAB files (LZX-based). Small small world.

It would be a kick to find out where all sorts of people are today - I used to know a number of people in the UK back in the hey-days of the c64 and later Amiga.

Bruno

Let us make this clear: you had System III running on 6502!?

Ah, you said 'Acorn', not specifically BBC B. Which hardware file servers were running on?