I've been wanting to rig up a device that communicates with a music
player on my PC for a while.  The gist is that there is a "host" end
device, which has an input for power, stereo audio, and Ethernet, and
has an output which a CAT5 cable can be plugged into.  Two pairs
are a forwarding of the Ethernet signal (low speed), one pair is power
(probably 9-12Vdc unregulated), and one pair is audio, digitized and
balanced for TP transmission.  At the other end is a PIC, with a
simple TCP client, which can interface with any of the tons of
music player plugins for remote interface through a web browser.
An LCD and a few controls.  A decoder for the audio, with a small
amp.  The end product would be a contraption which forwards via
a single CAT5 cable the ability to remotely control a music jukebox
PC.  It's kind of clumsy, no one would ever buy it, blah blah blah,
but it'd be cool and fun to make.  Most importantly, I don't think it
is TOO tough for a school project, and you'd stand to learn a lot
about a lot of things (analog audio-> digital audio -> analog audio,
transmission of digital signals over twisted pair, Ethernet/TCP,
PICs, user I/O via buttons/knobs/LCD, etc. etc.).

A lot of things have been done to break ground on this project,
including the aforementioned TCP/IP plugins for WinAMP et al.,
TCP stacks for PICs, the Microchip Ethernet transceiver, etc.
It's not going to be a matter of picking and choosing bits from
the internet and assembling them, but there will be lots of help
out there for you.

Good luck with whatever you choose, and do let us know what
that is!

Mike H.

On 5/11/07, Sami Barakat <furiousdog@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> This is my first post here. I've enjoyed reading a lot of the
> discussions here and quite like this place. I was wondering if anyone
> had any advice on a third year project that I will be starting in
> September for my BSc Computer Systems Engineering degree at the
> University of East Anglia in the UK. They gave out a list of projects
> for the students but nearly all of them were not applicable to my
> degree, they were mostly software programming for graphics, sound or
> image. I was wanted to do something that involved hardware as well as
> software.
> If anyone has any ideas for a project that would interact with a
> computer using PICs, so that there is a hardware element as well as
> software. I have only recently started using PICs and my knowledge of
> them isn't that great but I would like to improve on this.
>
> Thanks in advance
> Sami
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