Tembra, his music downloaded. Darmok and Jalad with the AUX cable.
Nice project. $249 seems a bit high, but I guess it's like the Fairphone, they can't save as much as the large manufacturers do.
Holy f*** $250? Wow well it is not for me then :(
I'm genuinely curious if someone's published a BoM cost breakdown, I'm wondering if there's a couple of super high tickets items in the like the scroll wheel and custom PCB cost.
The cost of the scroll wheel cannot possibly be more than 10€ and the pcb cannot be more than 1€ battery is about 4e and display can be 7-8, chip is 2-3e and passives, connectors etc brlow 5. The manufacturing costs of the thing are likely below 40€, even in small volumes. Assy costs are probably about 20% of the total.
Part of the high cost may be investments in moulds for the casing and r&d cost.
It's a project by an Australian team, so one would assume two things:
It’s a neat project. Costs as much as an iPod :P
Brings back fond memories of rockbox on my sansa.
Rockbox was the shit.
Breathed so much life into my iRiver. And I always had to defend the thing: “it's older than iPods! It can't be an rip-off”
Rockbox *is...
It's still going.
I use rockbox on a late ipod classic. I find it a very good listening experience, but I am interested in switching to open source *hardware
Now you too can play Doom on the worst screen imaginable!
Ayo that was amazing on the Sansa Clip+.
This is insanely priced, particularly when you see that it literally loses on everything but battery life compared to the original iPod 5gb, let alone the Classic.
Not quite. It has 1TB sd card storage. That's far, far better. And it has wifi and USB not just FireWire. Ram is less sure but how much ram do you need for playing tunes?
Where did you read 1TB? The webpage says it supports up to 2TB but doesn't say it ships with an SD card.
20 hour battery life of use is actually far better than I thought it would be. Wonder what the pi equiv build would bu
The Pi in any form is a much larger system with a whole lot more clock cycles, larger architecture, and more peripherals like a full memory management unit, graphics hardware, etc.
On the flip side IIRC most ESP32's are 210MHz and just dual core. It is microcontroller versus microprocessor, so probably 10× less power or more.
A Raspberry Pi Pico would be sufficient for this. It uses the RP2040, which is comparable to the ESP32, minus the WiFi.
Actually not really. The pi pico has no functional, good low power states currently developed. That is essential for a mobile device. A pi pico would simply drain the battery in sleep mode very quickly.
Tons of MCUs could do the job. Some STMs would also be good for it. The pi pico is more focused at non-mobile applications though at the moment like a very cheap general MCU for things that are USB powered or mains powered.
For something like this, you would use the RP2040 chip rather than the whole Pi Pico module. The RP2040 uses 180µA in its lowest power sleep mode and the flash and regulator will use a few more microamps. The battery would still last for over a year in standby. Of course it could just be turned off when not in use. Without an operating system, the boot time should only be a fraction of a second.
The ESP32 uses 800µA in sleep mode if you want to retain the memory contents or 10µA with only the RTC memory retained.
A low power STM32 would use orders of magnitude less power in sleep mode than either the RP2040 or ESP32 though.
Yes, I know. I have designed with the RP2040 and 180μA is extremely high power usage for deep sleep mode.
The ESP32 has far more sleep modes than that that each use different power, you are just talking about its light sleep: https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/latest/esp32/api-reference/system/sleep_modes.html
You are comparing the deep sleep of the pi pico to the light sleep of the ESP32 where the coprocessor is still running. The rp2040 light sleep mode consumes 7mA. It is literally orders of magnitude different. https://learn.adafruit.com/deep-sleep-with-circuitpython/rp2040-sleep (they only did light sleep.mode because deep sleep wasn't even available)
As far as the professional chips, they cost on average far more for less and less sleep gains. (A lot of the L series of stm is like 15€ per chip)
You would definitely use deep sleep for this as you would only wake it up to start using it with a button press. Whether they would use light sleep or deep sleep, there is an order of magnitude difference in sleep power consumption.
Looks like the first iPod, the brick.
https://www.westerndigital.com/products/mp3-players/sandisk-clip-sport-go?sku=SDMX30-016G-G46B
$50.
Edit: What's the point of open sourcing this product? It's an MP3 player. How does it utilize wifi? Does it run apps? Can it access a file server to download new media? The video and article doesn't go into that at all. BT is nice but Sandisk $50 clip players have had that for a long time.
This seems like 5x the price for a dev product.
What’s the point of open sourcing this product?
Some people just like to have the possibility to change and completely own their stuff. Some people actually do change firmware or hardware components. I'd say it's mostly for tech enthusiasts and tinkerers.
It's weird to ask "what the point of open sourcing this product", do you ask what the point of keeping the source closed is?
They got $136k funding from an original goal of $10k. Did it go to their head?
Cute, but what problem does this solve? Regardless of what you feel about any particular platform, consolidating multiple pieces of functionality into the highly integrated smartphone platform was a major step forward in mobility. This just feels like a regression.
Below you will find my highly researched list of advantages over the typical smartphone:
I think it can at least carry 2TB of offline music for you if you still like owning your own music if that's your thing. It's an option, nothing wrong with that
Listening to music like it's 2005 all over again
I will always prefer my iPod Mini with extra storage, new battery and Rockbox like this guy did, and the reasons are:
Genuine question : Why use that instead of storing your musics on your phone ?
I prefer an MP3 player over my phone. Here is the one I use. Why I like this one:
The only reason i’d consider this is if the soundcard was premium with DAC and amp included. Otherwise that piece of junk brings nothing to the table. Yes this thing has it, but its nowhere near premium.
This is all well and good, especially from a nostalgia perspective (in addition to the general pushback against cloud everything); but what I miss most about portable music nowadays is the lack of decent inline remotes (think early 2000s Sony MiniDisc players).
The player stated in your pocket, and the remote handled everything, volume, playback, and even had a dot-matrix screen to identify and navigate playlists!
Will buy for the Opus audio codec support alone.
I just want an mp3 player to replace my Walkman with sensme, they killed sensme and nothing has replaced it so to date the best mp3 player I own is that little thing, I tell it what mood I am in and it always delivers, I dread the day it dies.
I've tried cloud based music services like Spotify etc they are not really same thing as it's just global playlists for a mood/genre, not something tailored to your tastes in a set catalogue.
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