[geeks] home mp3 system suggestions

[Dave Kimmel]

On Thu, 30 May 2002, Nathaniel Grady wrote:

> 2) A lot of uC's have UARTS for RS232 / RS422 / RS485 / CAN (the latter
> two of which are multidrop iirc) as well as i2c (for the dac). Maybe
> something like  20mhz AVR or something should be able to handle the data
> rate w/o much trouble and have cycles left over to drive a LCD showing
> song name and a few buttons... The problem of course is that PC's don't
> often have anything but RS422 / USB. Maybe you could find a multiport
> serial card off ebay that could do 1 or 2 Mb/s and run point-to-point
> RS/232 (only really need 4 wires, maybe 5 if you wanted power also).

Microchip was showing a PIC16xxxx series microcontroller on their site
that featured USB...  Ahh, here we go:

http://www.microchip.com/1000/pline/picmicro/category/perictrl/14kbytes/devices/16c745/index.htm

Its only certified for "Low Speed", so I don't know if it will be fast
enough for uncompressed audio, but its worth a look.  I'm sure that there
are more capable microcontrollers out there that also support USB.

-- Dave Kimmel
   crisco_kid at shaw.ca