car2pc - picaxe - vmusic2

[plexer]

Hi guys new member here these picaxes look cool.

I've played with pics in the guise of 16f84 and 12c508 before but never creating code myself but these picaxes and their programming look ace.

I'm thinking of getting a car2pc for my car stereo with the intention of eventually hooking it up to a mini itx or similar computer to give me audio, video etc...

To start with though I was wondering if it's possible to put a picaxe in between this device and a vmusic2 in order to use my car stereo to control the vmusic2?

I know the car2pc is sending serial commands on the usb connector not sure if this needs to go into a usb to serial converter and then in to the picaxe?

If anyone has any thoughts on if this is possible or not then that would be great.

Ben

 

[hippy]

Unfortunately the car2pc is almost certainly a USB Slave device so it will not be able to control a USB to serial cable plugged into it, so no way to interface that to a PICAXE.

If you're looking at a comprehensive car-based entertainment system it is probably best to go straight to a PC-based system and use something like car2pc to interface to the car stereo.

For VMusic2 it's easy enough to create a PICAXE controlled MP3 player with its own controls and plug that into a car stereo Aux/Ext input but getting the car stereo head unit to control it would be an additional challenge. You'd need something like car2pc which could interface to a PICAXE as you've realised.

 

[mobents]

in his post he states that he is going to hook it up to a mini-itx based computer or similar. maybe it is possible to output serial commands trough the computer?

 

[hippy]

True, but if using a PC it doesn't make sense to then use a VMusic2; may as well just use an MP3 player application on the PC. The PC is far more capable than a PICAXE and VMusic2 combo.

My bathroom's Ambient Music System is PC-based but I am considering moving to a VMusic2. The main advantage will be no fan noise and secondly much lower power consumption. The disadvantage is that in total it will cost more than that PC did and as I want to have smooth fade-ins and fade-outs I have to add extra hardware to achieve that. Then there's the building, coding and getting it to work effort as well.

There are other advantages to a PC-based system as well - much larger disks, ad-hoc text-to-speech audible announcements ( SatNav for a car, TV programmes starting announcements at home ), plus it can be a hotspot server and anything else your imagination can take you to.

Nothing wrong with VMusic2 for what it does but it'll never compete with a PC.