Ask Slashdot: Hackable Portable Music Player For Helicopters? 158
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?"
This is the wrong forum for that... (Score:0, Interesting)
Anytime you plug something to an airframe you have to have certification.
Even if the device is "portable".
Start with a list of already certified devices...
Re:don't forget another important requirement (Score:1, Interesting)
Sabri, honestly, do you think ANYBODY would be stupid enough to install this otherwise? Please, if you have nothing intelligent to say, please don't say it!
Or, to put it another way - when you are flying an airplane with 4 people say and the pilot pushes the PTT--does ATC hear the conversation of the other three? Of course not. The source pushing the PTT is isolated, obviously. Many panels also have an ISO (Isolate) setting so that the pilot doesnt hear the other chatter in the aircraft when he's talking to ATC.
To make a long story short...
here are basically three legal solutions: an portable intercom with a music input (say via 3.5mm jack) OR something installed by an avionics shop. if the latter option is anything other than installing a 3.5" input jack onto the panel into which an ipod can be plugged, then it will end up costing far more than $1000, though, given the exorbitant shop rates of avionics shops, even the installation of this $1 item will probably cost at least a few hundred bucks.
It's not about software (Score:5, Interesting)
It is not about software, but about hardware. Apple requires you to buy a chip from them to "identify" your accessory as "runs with iphone" if you want it to do anything more than plain audio out. That is what the OP is talking about.
Considering this, I'd be looking for some iphone/ipod dock that has all the buttons you want and is certified. Rip that out of it's enclosure, connect your own buttons to it and you'll have your interface. No need to reinvent the wheel here, just adjust the packaging to your needs.
Re:This is the wrong forum for that... (Score:3, Interesting)
An easy solution (Score:5, Interesting)
2) Learn to play alltogether this [wikipedia.org]
3) ? ? ?
4) Profit!
Those who are curious to hear the piece can find it here [thespace.org]. Please don't play it over my home, thanks.