I love music, so i love this coming new product from Seeed Studio. It is a ipod/iphone dock compatible shield, can be work on Seeeduino v328, Seeeduino Mega and Arduino (Atmega 328 version). It is based on VS1053b, you can play variety of music format with this shield, even record sounds. The most interesting thing is, it has the very same 30 pins connector as ipod does have, and we make it possible to use the shield on any ipod compatible docks. You can output music to a external speaker, use the Play/pause, next song/previous song button on the dock or remote controller. The shield can be even powered by the dock, and all this feature makes the shield working as a real player now.
This product will be available very soon. If you have any suggestion to it, just leave in comment.
Wow!
You know then some of the ipod protocol then?
You know, I found this when looking for something similar but not quite.
Well... How hard would it be to make a board that could talk to the ipod through the dock port to retrive files as needed ant then stream a file through an optical out spdif or usb port (in pcm audio protocol)?
It will be as making a digital ipod dock as the Onkyo ND-S1 but with less functions and more portable.
I came to this idea wondering if it would be possible to load a program on an ipod to make it stream audio through the dock port to an usb port of any device in digital pcm audio, as if the ipod were a computer streaming audio to an external PC audio card.
As it is not possible to just make a program for any ipod, but any ipod can talk with a PC to sync...
Why to make this? Of course to send the information to an external DAC and get still better audio quality but in portable format. There are portable DAC/Headphone Amplifiers that can have SPDIF or USB PCM signal to work.
If I weren't thinking in something portable then I would just get the Onkyo ND-S1 hehe.
I took a look to the SeeedStudio Arduino Music Player Shield. Now that I think it. It would be nice to just make the board to stream audio in digital PCM through the dock port, as it doesn't have USB port. Then with a common dock to usb cable, bingo!!
