GiantDisc Mobile

The Obvious Idea

Since I have a well running GD system at home, one of my biggest wishes was to carry my music collection around. Now I'd like to have a mobile and battery powered GD system. The first attempt in that direction was the SBC-based portable jukebox that I built some years ago. It's fine, but still quite heavy and big, and it isn't beattery powered. It compares to a modern mobile mp3 player like the good old Osbourne compares to a notebook computer.

The purpose of this page is to collect ideas, how a mobile GD player could be designed. I suggest to have a discussion about this topic in the forum.

Architectures To Be Considered

In my opinion, a mobile GD system should be entirely built from standard hardware components that are available on the market. Special hardware developments should be avoided, and everybody should be able to rebuild a mobile GD player without touching the soldering iron.

Mobile GD-Server

This architecture is exactly the same as for a fixed GD system. A standard computer board with all necessary IO and a big enough harddisk runs the unadapted GD server.

Possible hardware:

A Gumstix SBC, i.e. a cfstix audio pack?
A nano-itx board
A PC/104 board (Kontron, Ampro, ...)
...

Pros	requires only minor extensions to the GD software
Cons	needs a lot of 'handicrafting' might be difficult to get a power consumption optimized system that can be battery powered the hardware might get quite expensive

Palm Plus Storage

Newer Palm models are powerful enough to take over all tasks of GD server, and basically it would be possible to port (a part of) the server to the Palm system. The only thing that is lacking is access to enough storage space for the audio files. I would need at least 40GB. As far as I know, there is currently no way to attach large harddisks to a Palm, allowing it to playback the audio files.

However, the Palm LifeDrive is a good starting point. It has currently a built-in 4GB harddisk. If future models have considerably more space, they could run an entire stand alone GD system.

Palm Controls Standard HD mp3 Player

The most important function of GD server is that it stores the audio files, that it is able to decode them and to send them to an audio output. Well, there is a myriad of devices that can do that - common HD-based mp3 players. In this architecture, the Palm still acts a the main user interface, it might contain the database with track and album informations, and it fully controls the playback on the mp3 player.

Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a standard mp3 player that is flexible ennough to be fully controlled by a Palm, i.e. via Bluetooth, serial port or IR.