Some quick thinking and back of envelope figures comes up with the following:
One board which has CPU, main memory (DDR2 or DDR3), boot rom, ethernet, USB, S/PDIF out, I2S to a DAC chip, WiFi and HDMI. No onboard display, no server. I have found some very nice new processors that do almost everything here, have linux distros ready to go which include drivers for all this (including audio for USB, I2S and S/PDIF). Quick calculations come up with $170 for board, all parts, and assembly in 25 unit quantities. Of course price goes down as quantity increases. This does NOT include: case, power supply, antenna and final assembly. I found a very interesting DAC chip for this. As some of you might have read in my posts, I am convinced that one of the biggest problems with getting REALLY good sound from digital audio is the compromised digital filters in DAC chip. This DAC is uniquein that it has a general purpose DSP system included which allows you to implement your own filter! (by default it uses the good old broken design that everybody uses, but you don't HAVE to use it) Using a non compromised filter will significantly improve the sound quality over what you can get from say a Touch. It also has enough power to do things like room correction filters, speaker crossovers etc. And it costs $9 in singles. It has a direct drive output so it can directly drive RCA jacks without any caps or op amps etc. With this DSP it can easily do things such as what was done in the Boom without adding any extra circuitry. It can also do other things such as Dolby digital or DTS decoding. I would add a connector on the main board so you can add an inexpensive daugther board and get 4 more outputs, you can then have it do surround sound or digtial crossovers for triamped speaker systems. With all the processing done inside the DAC chip! The WiFi is also rather interesting, I found a little WiFi module which has it's own processor which has a web server for configuratgion, supports bridge mode, AP mode AND has a router and DHCP server built in, all for $30. This means that not only can it connect to an existing wireless network, it can make it's OWN wireless network so you can use iPeng (or whatever) without having to have an existing network or worrying about how to connect this box and your chose remote to something else. It offloads all the wireless encryption etc from the main processor, it just looks like a wired ethernet device to the main processor (it also has a 5 port ethernet switch built in which can even do VLANs if you REALLY want to do fancy IT stuff) Without having to do display or wifi stuff the main processor really doesn't have all that much to do, just run linux, IP stack, audio drivers and Squeezelite. It doesn't need to be a very powerful processor. There are some very nice new processors which are very low power (electrical wise, not throughput wise) which have two processors on the same chip, one which is the main processor and the other that is optimized for peripheral handling which takes care of a lot of the real time interaction with things such as the ethernet and USB, freeing up the main processor from having to deal with the low level interactions with these. The linux drivers deal with all this already. With the low power use of everything in the system it might be quite possible to run this as a battery powered device. It's not going to be very big either, something like 3x3 inches. How does that sound, any thoughts? Thanks, John S. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=97881 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
