AVR Stereo

Ook, so i've gone from ambitious to down right insane :wink: Because buying a stereo offers far to great value for money and practicality I decided it would be ultra cool (heh heh) to design my own...

I have a couple of questions regarding this:
what AVR to use? It needs to be networkable (it should then work as a pair of remote speakers)
Know of a high quality DAC? (2 channel, 24 bit 192Khz) - output will go to amps, how hard can it be?
IDE / SATA drive interface - is this possible, I need reasonbale data through put?
Should I use a colour screen or could I have a keyboard and an old-school terminal interface :stuck_out_tongue:
Oh and what about MP3 decoders?

I would have put this elsewhere, but you guys are an oracle on micro controllers and as it AVR based it may turn into an arduino.. I could add a USB port and FTDI chip and create a little boot loader too.... Hmm... Maybe I will...

Right, I scaled back to a 16 bit DAC and went for the ever popular TDA1543, dual channel DAC. I'm going to play with it and the arduino when it arrives... might make 10K of sound for it... :stuck_out_tongue:

Sounds like an ambitious project all right!

Not that I know much about designing or building stereos myself, but I did build my own mp3 player some years back.

Have a look at Yampp: http://www.myplace.nu/mp3/

I have the Yampp-3/USB, which is based on some ATmega chip, FTDI and a mp3 decoder (that can only accept bitrates up to 256 kbps), and has a PATA interface for a standard harddrive (but uses some homebrew filesystem).

Anyway... might be useful, at least for inspiration! :slight_smile:

Ok, having looked over that I can see I have a couple of nice options, 1 is to use an ATMega644 an MPEG decoder chip and some sort of IDE/SD Card interface (SD card is most likely) and a screen or to use an ATMega1280 (as in the Arduino Mega) and then I can easily add more RAM, and things like IR decoder, rotary control for volume, plenty of buttons (I2C is used up on the 644 by the DAC/MPEG controller)

What do you think?

How about our rMP3?

You use your Arduino to build the rest - i.e. the interface to your "Stereo".

I'll have a demo project ready shortly, sorta like what you're looking to do - in fact, it will have a clock (with alarms), display, and is controlled with an IR remote.

It reads files from SD/SDHC cards, and can play pretty much any MP3 file (VBR + CBR up to and including 320 kbps).

Here's the thread for the rMP3:
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1259561121

b

What do you think?

If you want it to be really cool, you need to build it with bumpin' 12s and a 100 watt amp in a carpeted enclosure styled like an old-school 80's ghetto blaster - complete with LED light show, and a pop-up mini disco ball.

They need to hear you commin', before they see you commin'!

:sunglasses: