The K/oS Player II is a small, versatile, easy to build Audio MPEG Player. It's one of those projects, you can find a dime a dozen on the internet today, but this one is special in many ways.
It's based on the IPC@Chip device, an internet enabled, DOS compatible microcontroller by Beck-IPC GmbH. Because it's basically a 20MHz PC shrunk to a DIP-Package it's quite more powerful than the usual small microcontroller players. It has 512kb of Flash and RAM, has an onboard-integrated Ethernet controller, and comes at a reasonable price.
Because you can rely on a complete TCP/IP implementation, it's easy to integrate new, cool features - you could build a stand alone internet radio device, that can time-shift programmes to harddisk - or fetch songs from an FTP server.
The current player features an IDE interface for mass storage devices like ATAPI CD-ROMs and Harddisks (which can be filled by FTP of course). It has a cool graphic display to impress your friends. It is easy to program because you can use tried-and-tested Compilers like Borland C++. And most important of all: it sounds just great.
So if you're looking for a project that is easy to build and fun to have, give it a try :)
The whole package, including software, hardware and documentation is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License GNU General Public License.
Copyright (c)2001 by Thomas Kindler
thomas.kindler@gmx.de, http://www.kreapc.de