MP3 Player Box HOWTO

2. MP3 box

The sole and only reason why you, the reader, is engulfing yourself in reading this material along with a nice warm container full with java, is so that you:

• Wish to make a self-supportive box with only four cables sticking out of it: an RJ-45 network cable, a power cable, and two RCA cables (or just one 1/8 mini stereo plug).
• Have all your mp3's on a big-server, while this MP3-box would fetch the files from the server.
• Have no floppy driver, no video card, nor any harddrive in the MP3-box. Just a power supply, sound card, network card, memory, cpu, and a serial infrared receiver.
• Be the envy of your friends :=)
• Play your mp3's using your remote without having to turn on your workstation.

2.1 Design

Its important to keep certain things in mind:

• Size of the computer component (I was tempted to use PC104 boards, but they were to expensive). Height of ISA/PCI cards (so that the box doesn't look like a baby-AT case).
• The appealing side of the box - does it look like a square rectangle, pyramid, triangle, or something even more weird?
• Paint. Do you want see-through box with flashing lights inside, inconspicuous black box, or chrome looking?
• Cost. The absolute minimum (taking into consideration that you, the reader, has no spare computer parts) is about $70 (excluding tax, shipping, etc)
• KISS (Keep It Simple and Stupid) - take everything that's unnecessary and get rid of it (parallel port, modem card, video card, etc).

The idea behind this box is to separate tasks - the MP3-box can only play the mp3's from a server, while you, the reader, can freely add more files to your big-end server. Thus, the MPEG-box wouldn't need a harddrive, nor floppy drive. It would boot the operating system from the network (from the same server where the mp3 files are located).