CyberEclipse - MP3 Player
CyberEclipse Menu -------------------------- Home Pictures Hardware Software FAQ News Sign Guestbook View Guestbook Linux links: Red Hat Linux.org Freshmeat Slashdot MP3 links: mpg123 Xaudio Audio Galaxy Guestbook: Sign View	Introduction to CyberEclipse It was about beginnings of 1998 when I became familiar with MP3's and Digital Music and how portable the new future of music was going to be. About 9 months later I decided to build CyberEclipse, since I wanted a MP3 player that I could use at home, and in my car. Sure, I could've paid couple of hundreds or thousands of Dollars and bought someone else's product, i.e. EMPEG or Rio 500, but I wouldn't have that self satisfaction if I had done that. Since then, As you may have noticed or might notice, I've changed the original specs that I had done initially for CyberEclipse. The first version of CyberEclipse was based on a CD-ROM which was capable of playing both audio CD's and MP3 burned on CD-R. Due to consistent problems I had with the CD-ROM unit and not to mention the final size, I decided to change the specs and move on to a Hard drive based player. CyberEclipse is a UNIX MP3 Player based on Small Board Computer (SBC) and Linux RedHat 6.2. It consists of two units, the CPU or SBC and the Controller interface. The SBC has all the necessary components that I needed for this project. For example PCI Audio, Graphics, Ethernet, serial and Parallel ports including USB are all built in the unit. CyberEclipse, as mentioned above, is ran on Linux RedHat 6.2 distribution. I am proud to say that I had to create a custom Kernel for this unit, with a size of less than 3 MB. Fortunately I didn't need any conventional type of Hard drive and/or Floppy drives to have the CPU boot up. The SBC included a Flash Disk port, that acts just like a regular IDE drive. The flash Disk that I'm using is only 16 MB, but this can be upgraded up to 128 MB or even 256 MB (available by end of 2000). By using a Flash Disk, I can store all my MP3's on the Hard drive and mount it as Read Only device, that way I don't have to worry about shutting down properly. Portion of Flash Disk is set to be read only, and the rest is read/write. This way I can save any Play-List in this area. Look under Software for future upgrade and plans. :)
© Copyright 2000, CyberEclipse. All material found on this site is copyrighted. No material may be reproduced or reused without explicit permission. [email protected]