The Audrey Project - Building a Wall Mounted MP3 Player.

It all started when CmdrTaco let me borrow his 3Com Ergo Audrey. I set it on my coffee table and used it to do basic Web Surfing. Then one night, while surfing Audrey Hacking, I found PhJuke. PhJuke is a basic jukebox designed for Photon (QNX Linux's window system). That, along with QNX's program called fs-cifs to mount Windows shares or Samba shares, I could play MP3's. Side Note: I wanted to mount my RedHat 7.3 box, but for some reason whenever I do any kind of streaming media to or from the machine, it crashes (doh!). I think it's a problem with how Samba was compiled on the 2.4 kernel (at least I've heard of people running Debian on the 2.4 kernel are having similar problems). I could probably fix it by recompiling my kernel, but I'm too lazy, back to the story. So I ended up mounting the Windows share from the audrey. Given I had to create a gigantic buffer since networking in Windows 98 is slow. By buffering the audio I was able to keep the streaming MP3's from skipping.

So, now I have an MP3 player sitting on my coffee table. But that's not enough. I noticed PhJuke had "boxes" around the artists and CD covers. I thought it was interesting and looked into it further. As it turns out, PhJuke can import CD covers from their respective directories. I plugged away on Allmusic.com downloading all of the CD covers. Took a couple of weeks (working every now and then), but it was well worth it. Now, To play my favorite CD, I just click on the cover.

Finally, I was sick of having the Audrey on my coffee table. My friend Jetta_Josh thought it'd look cool if we mounted it on the wall by my chair. And so we did. Check out the thumbnails below if you want to see it in action. If you have any questions about how it was hacked, or other technical questions about the audrey, check out AudreyHacking.com or shoot me an email.