Thread: HU Quality AM/FM RDS/RBDS Radio with Features

Put me down as well...at least you should be getting a rough idea as to how many people want this

Happy New Year all!!

Oh man. I'm down for sure. Even in DIY kit form. Any idea on a ballpark price?

Seth - are you still in need of a PIC programmer?

I may be able to offer my services...

( I haven't finished reading this thread yet tho - it's pretty exhaustive; so I apologize if this post is premature / naive)

Ok guys the way I see it right now there are two things we must consider :

USB vs LPT interface

12V power input and how people that use laptops in the car can handle this requirement


For the first one the solution is simple...WE CAN HAVE BOTH !!!! It's just a PCB layout design thing to leave the choice to the end user which interface he wants to use. Leave that to us...

For the second one things are more complex. One thing is for sure: we need 12V. The reason is that an 8.5V tunning voltage is required which is very easy to produce from 12V (downconvert) than from 5V (complex design with unwanted extra cost).
The way I see it one solution is to make a small regulating circuit which will stabilize the 12V from the car and feed the radio. This circuit will act like the "egg" for the Lillys and will be used only by those who need it (it won't be embedded to the radio PCB).
Any thoughts on this?

Seth -
I would recommend USB here. Among the key benefits of USB are a single wire run (for those folks that are mounting equipment in multiple locations in the vehicle; ie. long wire runs like: dashboard <-> trunk, etc). Using LPT would require a thick 25 conductor cable and a couple of bulky 25 pin connectors. LPT is a very unforgiving interface (wrt distance runs) and while it's easy to use, I tend to think that I2C or USB are clearly worth the extra development effort here.

[ Full disclosure: We're working on a couple of I2C based carputer devices; so my opinion should be considered very biased. ]

As for USB, the only drawback that I can think of is the licensing issue and having your device recognized as your brand/product by the OS. I think we can help you out here because we have a usb.org vendorID and ProductID (VID/PID). We can help your project recognition as it relates to the OS'es (Win/Linux,etc).

It'll set you back about $2500 bucks to join the USB consortium otherwise, and you'd probably have to pay fee's on top of that to distribute your product with the "USB" icon.

If you're interested, contact me via email or even post a message here - this is a great project and I'm very interested in it. We have a few projects that are a perfect complement to this, so it might be wise to discuss plugging them all together.

Kind regards,
CB

if its parallel, I think you will still be able to user a USB/LPT device, and run it USB when needed... no?
I am still planning the use of a USB port replicator for all my needs, and a 1-cable connection to the computer that I might make removable...

but that's only me, I like those old-school connectors

It's probably been repeated 100 times already. The parallel solution is just temporary to support prototype testing. The final solution will be USB and I suspect based upon the new Microchip USB enabled flashableMCUs (18F2455 family).

@Cbergeron: Please PM Seth if you haven't already.

Put me down for one when they come out.

Besides the app. notes available on Microchip's website, do you have any additional info on USB with the 18F2455? I fried my Cypress EZ-USB dev board a few months ago so I've been researching these PICs as cheaper alternatives for the past few days. Are the newer flash chips code compatable with the OTP(16C745) ones?

I didn't check but you could compare the data sheets to get a good idea.