The player from the inside. The power supply is on the left, with computer in the middle (and 40GB hard drive on top of it).

Here's a little better look into the player. This also shows the fan (lower left). Unfortunately, even with this fan blowing lots of air, the box gets really hot, and the display turns too dark to read. The power supply and the computer itself don't generate too much heat (indoor's it's fine). The problem is having it sit on my dash in the sun of a Houston summer.
I'm working on fixing this by covering the box with the mylar-and-bubble-pack insulation of a car window shade. If that doesn't do it, I'm going to have to resort to active cooling and put a peltier junction (solid-state cooling device) on top of it.

This shows the back of the LCD, with the button circuit board piggy-backed on it. I wanted to be able to take the top off entirely, so the power comes from a standard PC power supply connector, and the cable leading off on the right is a standard serial cable plugging into the computer.
I've also used an 18 pin DIP socket to plug the wires from the button into. On the previous incarnation of the display, I soldered everything in place, making it extremely difficult to do anything with the buttons. The chip on the left is the PIC16C54C that was custom programmed for me by David Schmidt. This is a truly amazing chip--it's a complete computer: 12 I/O lines (one being used for serial out, the rest for input), virtually no external circuitry needed. In fact, the only components there besides a couple of resistors are a transistor (on the left) to automatically reset the chip if the voltage falls, and a ceramic resonator (on the right) for clock timing.

This shows the combination of velcro and mouse pad that forms the bottom of the player. It sits on the rounded middle of my Beetle's dash, so I had to add bits to keep it from rocking from side to side.

You can see the connectors and such all along the right side of box here. From left to right: power switch (and fan port underneath that), audio out, power, and on the right, ethernet.
I'm experimenting with FM transmitters, so I'm hoping I can stop using the audio port (currently connecting the stereo through a cassette adapter).
The power supply connector only has two conductors running to it right now, but it's a three-conductor connector, which will allow me to eventually add an accessory line. That (with the apropriate hardware) will allow me to monitor the car's power, and automatically start up and shut down the player.
I was going to put in keyboard and VGA connectors, but I realized that as long as nothing is going too wrong, I can ssh into the box through the ethernet port, making direct keyboard/video unneccessary. (Of course, having ethernet makes it easy to update the software and add music.)
Eventually I'm going to open up the computer's case and add the USB connectors to the headers on the motherboard. With USB, I can add an 802.11b ("Wi-Fi") wireless connection to my home network. The idea is that when I pull into the driveway, the player will automatically scan my collection of mp3 files on my home server and grab any new songs it doesn't already have.

The rest of these images just show the player in the car. You can see how I've labelled the buttons, and what the default display looks like. (The first three lines are artist, album, and song title, and the times on the right are elapsed, remaining, and total time for the song.)
I'm also planning on adding menu functions. (The "M" on the left button is for Menu.) Then I'll use the bottom line of the LCD to put context sensitive labels for what the buttons do in each menu.

(You can also seen in these pictures the metal rose that I had made by John Dilbeck.

player-display-left.jpg  
player-display-right.jpg  
player-face.jpg  
player-startup.jpg  
player_from_outside-1.jpg  
player_from_outside-2.jpg  

All images Copyright 2003 Paul Archer (tigger@io.com)