I am having to repeat my final year at Uni due to a hard disk and backup corruption which really got me down at the time! Now though, i am having to repeat the Final Year again but only part time and only my project so i've decided to challenge myself.

My plan is to make a portable audio player using Smart Media as my storage format.

Im utilising a Microchip PIC as the main controller and to drive an LCD as well as using a dedicated DSP IC to do the MP3 decoding as there are several about, suc as those below, but i i wanna explore another route.

http://www.micronas.com/products/documenta...3507d/index.php

http://www.vlsi.fi/vs1001/vs1001.htm


Rather than a dedicated DSP decoder that can do either MP3 by itself, or along with AAC and WMA, im wondering what the iriver range use, as they say tey may be supporting Vorbis in the future, does anyone know what IC's they use and have any links to them? and also got any general comments on my idea and wether it sounds viable!


Thanks for any input

Kristian Tippins

Hi, kritip!

Don't have exact specs as you ask, but can hint you a few links to photos of Slim-X PCB. Not of the best quality, but still... The original site is in russian (it's a good online shop, btw). They had one item broken, so they decided to take a look inside and share the truth with the world:

upper part

bottom part

To me the PCB looks very decent for such a device. What do _you_ think about it?

Hope this will help...

Thanks a lot ByteHead,
that was very helpful, i found the main chip responsible for decoding all of the compressed audio is the Cirrus Logic EP7312 which supports a number of audio formats. I only just found the site so i'll be downloading all of the Data sheets and studying how the chip works, how to programm it, etc.

If this chip is of any use to me, ie. not to expensive and complex i may try an give my project ago with it rather than a dedicated an non upgradable DSP, if i do and it succeds, it may mean that i or someone else may be able to implement other audio formats into my device!! That will be a LONG way off though. My project doesn't even start till the end of September, i was thinking i could get a head start though and hopefully it will be aproved.

Thanks ever so much again,

Kristian