Echo – Open Hardware Music Player
My big wish list item for this would be a clickwheel. But I'm guessing the ones Sony is using are made in-house. But super cool!
https://electronics.sony.com/audio/walkman-digital-recorders...
The Tangara music player has one as well. And the hardware is open!
You could make your own clickwheel pretty easily. 3d printed detents, abec bearing, magnet and a hall effect rotation sensor.
I love this.
I know it's not "open", but it would be great if the MCAD was done in Onshape. For better or worse its the closest thing we in the mechanical world have to a collaborative editor.
I'd be delighted to contribute.
I'm too lazy to pull down the KiCAD files to figure out what the chipset is. Anyone know?
From the BOM:
MCU is an STM32H743IGT, external SDRAM is a Winbond W9825G6KH-6, and audio CODEC is a TI TLV320AIC3104IRHBR.
> It's primarily designed to run Rockbox
Fuck yeah
I remember being young and having loading Rockbox on my iPod. Great times.
Playing DOOM, which I hid from my hyper-religious parents, was always a blast. It trashed the battery so I kept it plugged in - it would get very hot. Probably terrible for the device but I was a kid and wanted to slay some demons.
There was a Mandelbrot viewer that was pretty cool. Lots of stuff I'm probably forgetting.
It also functioned as a device for adult images that I would dual boot into. Not the best for my young brain most likely. Still, I have plenty of nostalgia around using computers to solve parental problems. Or creating more because I didn't understand partitioning, boot loaders, or really anything when installing Ubuntu on a family machine. :)
I never realized people would play Doom in rockbox unironically, always assumed it was just for coolness factor/as a demo. Lol.
I have been wanting something like this for so long. Ideally it could be modded for a 18650 battery or two, which are far more available than BL-5C.
I love it! I used to be a huge fan of Rockbox.
Saw the title and had hoped it might be a new open source firmware for the Amazon Echo.
and if you don't want to wait, you can get an open hardware music player hre as well: https://cooltech.zone/tangara/
they're different -- tangara is an ipod homage with custom firmware and a touchwheel. echo r1 is meant to run rockbox with buttons.
they differ in i/o ports as well: tangara has a regular old headphone jack. echo r1 has a TRRS jack and a line-out jack.
Thanks for that link! I went down the rabbit hole and found this article which I found to be a great read:
https://cooltech.zone/tangara/blog/2024-02-07-touchwheel/
Kudos to the team, looks pretty damn solid. How does the touch wheel work in practice compared to the iPod? Is there any tactile feedback?
I think a classic iPod touch wheel feels more polished, but the Tangara wheel is like 90% of the way there. In previous firmware versions the middle button was too sensitive but that was fixed. You can adjust the sensitivity but I find the default setting to be perfect for me.
I love my Tangara! I even made some custom themes for it. The regular ol’ headphone jack is perfect and it sounds great too. I wouldn’t wait for the Echo R1 unless you really need Rockbox or the different I/O.
Since it has ESP32 wifi, how is the battery life on tangara?
The device has WiFi capability but there is no functionality built into the default firmware yet, so the antenna is powered down.
Never had an issue with mine. It lasts for days with moderate usage. This is using wired headphones; not sure how much of an impact bluetooth has.
I don't use one, but my partner reports it lasts a couple days of use (~10 hrs/day). I think that's with wifi turned off though. Not sure if this is with bluetooth or wired heaphones either