Anybody ever try to make a Flash drive a DAP?

[oicdn]

I work at Officemax, and see we have insane specials on flash drives. Some of those Flash drives are like 4GB.

I was just kinda curious too see if any of you guys have ever tried to make a flash drive a DAP.....seems feasible, just wondering if it's ever been done, and if there would be a SQ difference from the different chips. Like you could make a kinda of attachment where you could attach any USB flash drive and see if there is any difference in SQ, or, if you have multiple flash drives, you have the option to switch them out...have your albums sorted by flash drive...that'd be sick...

Possible?

 

[wgr73]

There would be a lot of firmware hacks to be performed!

 

[oicdn]

Well, what about just ONE flash drive? So that there wouldn't be the need for the hacking different firmwares of different brands, nor the interface for swapping.

Just kinda thought about it while at work one day...

 

[error401]

It's been done with normal flash media (ie. CF or SD), but I haven't seen anyone doing it with a USB stick (the interface is considerably more complicated). wgr73 is right though, you'd have a righteous amount of firmware to write to get it to work. The USB stick itself is 'dumb' and has no processing power to do anything other than keeping track of the physical block -> logical block mapping and controlling the cells. You'd have to add a microcontroller and an MP3 decoder chip (or just an ARM or something beefier than a uC), interface, and paraphernalia (amps, power supplies etc.).

See these projects for inspiration

http://www.teuthis.com/html/daisy_mp3.html
http://ladyada.net/make/minty/index.html

 

[Joshatdot]

Kinda what you want to build, its a Auto Cig adapter w/USB interface for Flash Drives.

http://www.directron.com/usbmp3308.html

 

[threepointone]

I think I recall seeing an ad for an eval board / kit that did this somewhere. It was probably in Nuts & Volts.

From long, long, long ago I think Sandisk also made a DAP which loaded songs from a USB Drive. They discontinued it because of reliability issues, and I think it was designed only to fit sandisk flash drives.

 

[Captain ?degard]

there is the cig thingy for cars, bought one for mom and its a fair deal (paid $13 or so). also, ive seen some specially made for certain flash sticks... cruzer micro i think, not sure.

 

[threepointone]

This isn't quite what I remember seeing (I'm guessing there are flash drive kits by other companies) but FTDI came out with the new Vinculum chip with a built-in USB Host interface. It seems to be targeted, at least partly, to DIYers, so it shouldn't be difficult to obtain/work with it. They have a VMusic kit which seems to do exactly what you're thinking about.

Of course, it'd be a lot more fun if you could hack the cheapo $12 cigarette plug thing and mod it to death =D

 

[mono]

The answer is that it is not "feasible" it would be an incredible amount of work and very large, costly and time consuming relative to just buying one of those tiny thumb-type DAPs. It might be possible to build the whole thing from scratch and then connect to the flash drive components but not at all practical.