This here’s the Redshark Mark 2. All the media playing goodness of Redshark, with 100% less Xbox.
- NSLU2, overclocked, running OpenDebianSlug
- Generic 1GB USB flash drive for root filesystem
- Firefly 20GB USB hard drive for tune storage
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster MP3+ USB sound adapter
- Linksys WGA11B wireless bridge, running in ad-hoc mode
- Powered USB hub
- mpd + phpmp2/neompc web-based frontends (one for PCs, one for the PDA)
- Internet Explorer on an HP iPAQ hx2415 client
This turned out surprisingly well, for two nights of work. I have a line on an automotive 12V power supply that ought to drive it just fine for car use. When it’s all stacked up, it makes an impressively small little bundle (smaller than the xbox by a long shot, anyway). I have to make up some custom short cables to make it really neat. Once I get all the packages I need set up and ready to go, I’ll transfer the root filesystem from the Firefly to a USB flash stick to remove some moving parts (ed. note: done). It boots very quickly and doesn’t have the heat and power concerns the Xbox rig did. I’ve given thought to really cranking up the front end by ditching the PDA and going to a 7 inch, 800×480 touchscreen driven by a USB VGA adapter. Also for the proper install, I’ll be replacing the 20GB Firefly drive with the 200GB drive from the original Redshark in a USB enclosure for monstrous amounts of storage.
How it all works is:
The NSLU runs MPD (Music Player Daemon), which provides socket-based control over playing music, creating playlists, and other interesting things. A nice sized hard drive for storing music is attached to the NSLU, along with a USB sound card. MPD plays music from the hard drive out of the USB sound card through ALSA. A web app (two actually; phpMp2 and neompc) running under Apache/PHP4 connects to MPD and provides a web-based front end. The PDA hits that web app over a ad-hoc WiFi network set up through the WGA11B bridge and drives the whole mess. The music drive is formatted FAT32 so you can unplug it, throw it into a PC, load up a whole mess of tunes, and plug it back in.