The hardware is actually an intel-based PC. It uses a P100 with 16MB ram. Don't ask me if a 486 would do the job or if the HD is too large, I just had these parts so I used them ;-) I believe that a 486 would do the job, and the HD isn't needed, a floppy would be just fine.

Output

Instead of a monitor it has a 4line/20chars LCD (LCD2041) Display from Matrix Orbital. I bought it from linuxcentral. It arrived here in greece in 10 days, no problem with customs. It's expensive, but it has an excelent viewing angle and you don't have to program a PIC. You can find several C routines for handling this LCD in the software section. I mounted the LCD on the 3.5inch bay using a drill and imagination. It took 2 bays.

Input

For the keyboard, instead of using some parallel/serial keypad I chose to dismantle an old keyboard I had and use its key decoder chip, so as you can see in the photos, I just connected some switches in the places where the keyboard keys would normally be and mounted them to the front. I didn't solder the cables directly to the motherboard so that I can easily disconnect the front keys and connect a normal keyboard (for upgrading linux). More info can be found here. I've also installed a floppy to automatically update the software from the rxcontrol with a touch of a button (from version 1.1).
Infra red support is here thanks to Bryan Mattern.

Media

Linux boots from a HD though it could boot from a flash disk. The mp3 files are on cdrom which plays for 10 hours constantly @128Kbps. When DVD is out it will have 18.5 days of music/disk.

Case

The case comes from an old PC but I painted it with black-satin spray. The height is 13cm,which is the shortest case I could find. It fits perfectly among my other stereo equipement. The front panel with the keys and the display needs a heavy redesign though.

Noise

I extinguished the noise from the Power Supply fan with a simple variable resistor in series with the fan. I can adjust the fan speed that way to something not audible. The only thing that can be heard right now is the cpu fan which is not a problem. The whole thing does not overheat even here in Greece :-)

Summary

  • pc case, power supply (plus fan trim resistor)
  • motherboard with onboard IDE and serial/parallel ports
  • Pentium 100 MHz, 16 MB RAM, CPU fan
  • graphics card (not required,but why not?)
  • sound card PCI 128
  • CD-ROM drive 4x, completely silent
  • hard disk unit 300MB SCSI from an old Apple (!)
  • Future Domain SCSI controller (1992)
  • floppy disk drive for software updates
  • Special parts:
  • serial LCD panel from MatrixOrbital working at 19200bps
  • customized keyboard