Ask Slashdot: Hackable Portable Music Player For Helicopters?

First time accepted submitter mrhelio writes "I work for a medium-sized helicopter company; we mainly fly tourists around on sightseeing flights. My company needs help finding a hacker-friendly portable music player for our helicopters. We have a problem with our onboard music players — mostly because it is an obsolete terrible design. The manufacturer has made an updated model, but it's basically the same obsolete design with the same terrible software and user interface. We are worried about spending $1000 per unit on these because the manufacturer will eventually stop making replacement units and then we will be force to buy upgrades for our entire fleet again and get everything recertified. (Any piece of equipment hard mounted in a commercial aircraft has to be certified by the FAA and it takes a lot of paper work, time and money for that to happen.) So we have a new plan: get portable music players like iPods, and plug those into the aux input in the intercom system. We need something that has nine hours of battery life, can hold at least three hours of music, and has remote control options for start, stop, volume, and selecting tracks and playlists, and a display that is visible in bright and sunny as well as dark conditions. The remote control option is the toughest part to find. The pilots need to be able to control the music without taking their hands off the flight controls for safety reasons. There are buttons and toggle switches already designed into the flight controls for these kind of purposes and we have mechanics/ engineers that can wire it all together, but the music player has to support the remote interface in the first place. Our first choice would be to give each pilot an iPod, but Apple is notoriously anti-hacking and anti-open source, plus you have to pay them ridiculous licensing fees to get access to their USB interface. So we are looking for a manufacturer that is open source / hacker friendly and makes something that meets our needs. Do you know of anything that would work for us? Maybe something that runs Rockbox? Should we just break down and design something from scratch like the Butterfly MP3 player?"

Apple isn't anti-open source

[gnasher719]

I don't know where you got this from. Apple has no problems putting open source software on the App Store, for example. Some open source software developers however have a problem with that.

To put your own code onto an iPod Touch, what you need is a Mac, $99 for a developer account, and you can install any software you write on up to 200 iOS devices of your choice. No need for hacking at all. No restrictions on what your code does.

How about repurposed Android smartphones?

[The Brother Grim]

Grab a few old Android devices--maybe N1s--turn off their cellular and wifi radios, load them up with music, and use 3.5 mm audio cable converted to whatever your aux input is on your existing system. Some 3.5mm audio cable can be purchased with/cobbled together to include built-in play, pause, and track skip buttons... Also, there's the rooting factor for most Android devices as well as the fact that most non-Apple smartphones use some variant of microUSB for charging and syncing.

Pandora

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you use Pandoras?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_pandora

They have great battery life, are very hacker-friendly, and great audio.

Cowon X7

[Anonymous Coward]

Large library size (160gbs), loooong battery life and very friendly to RockBox

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowon#MP3_players

Re:Time equals money

[jamesh]

If you spend more than 20 hours to engineer something yourself, the $1000 starts to look like a bargain.

Depends on if a "medium sized helicopter company" has 5 helicopters or 50... and also if, after your 20 hours, you end up with something better than "terrible"

RF interference - assisted on multiple fronts

[Firethorn]

One thing that I'd like to point out is that the RF problem has diminished by the user devices themselves. When you go from 12V switching to under 1V, you're looking at a lot less RF interference coming from the device anyways. Go from kilohertz to mega/gigahertz and you up the interference frequencies; lowering the range they can travel and the odds they'll interfere with the much slower switching electronics in the craft.

Basically, at this point it's hard to tell the average portable consumer device from background noise, as long as it's not intentionally transmitting.

Re:just buy a tablet?

[another random user]

Really? Nobody mentioned music? Let me check in the summary:

We have a problem with our onboard music players

and

So we have a new plan: get portable music players like iPods, and plug those into the aux input in the intercom system. We need something that has nine hours of battery life, can hold at least three hours of music, and has remote control options for start, stop, volume, and selecting tracks and playlists, and a display that is visible in bright and sunny as well as dark conditions. The remote control option is the toughest part to find. The pilots need to be able to control the music without taking their hands off the flight controls for safety reasons.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but I'm pretty sure that music was indeed mentioned.