PICLIST, BCCs. I've had a query re an audio playback device. I'm liable to be only acting as an advisor. The requirement could probably be largely met by existing "MP3" players but the ability to customise control capabilities somewhat would be good. I'm not well acquainted with the latest and greatest in this area. I could spend many a happy hour asking Mr Google but I'm short on time and I just know there are people here who know just what's available. So any informed comments (and some uninformed ones) would be appreciated. Audio playback device. This isn't what it's for but, for concept, think of it as similar to an automated guide for a tour or a historic building walk-around. Something suitable for the tower of London (many buildings, many rooms, many items, + various historical or thematic threads) would fit the model well. User is able to select building, room, item of interest of to run preset modules which may have sub modules and sub sub modules. Ability to go back to a bookmark or to retain several "tours" at once and jump between them as required would be good. eg Let's freeze the Anne Boleyn tour here and jump across to the BeefEaters history section and we'll get back to Anne later. Similar would be a Supermarket product finder (Product type, aisle, shelf, product / This week's specials, ...) or a real estate houses for sale descriptor (Area, price range, street, room, ...). Cost sensitive. Cheaper is better./ Very cheap is very good. Not enough volume to support custom development at this stage. All content provided from central source as a packaged "download". Ability to bulk change whole audio contents, probably preferably by swapping a memory "card". This would most usefully be a mass market card such as microSd or similar due to cost and ease of interface. Could be downloadable from a "programmer" but media swap is probably better as media can then be distributed manually without expense of a local writer. Encoding - whatever suits - MP3, Ogg Vorbis, .... or some mix if appropriate. Content protection probably not required from an IP point of view but it's desirable that users not be able to replace the content with other. ("This Tower of London player is great for my MP3's ..."). Audio content tens to a few hundred hours probably. [At 44 kBps mono and raw storage you get about 50 hours/GB so with most coding schemes something able to be accomodated by typical flash cards would be very adequate. eg Micro SD or SD in the 1 GB -16 GB range, with 1 GB very likely being enough in many cases. Audio quality - good but not stunning. Stunning is OK if cost or memory requirements very little affected. (eg 4 x bandwidth increase OK if 2 GB still more than enough for most needs). Mono OK. Stereo a bonus. Nice would be a display (LCD, OLED or whatever) that allows some degree of guiding / menu and maybe a help system (latter not essential). User ability to configure bookmarks, playlists etc would be good to have. Ability to add text menu data to such a useful bonus. eg "Tuesday tour" etc Video capability not requested but if this was available at essentially no extra cost so much the better - resolution at whatever is supported by screen used. MP4 good (due to compression ratio) but any format OK. Battery, low power drain without significantly compromising capability, headphone drive, but ability to drive at least a modest speaker would not go astray. Rechargeable battery useful (in device charging from a power pack etc useful - from "USB" power best of all. I imagine that the above is liable to be within the capability of a number of existing units. Any comments from people who are aware of what's out there and what it can do would be appreciated. What would be useful would be a commercially available hardware platform with open source (or even for $) software available that was able to be customised to refine the capability. As noted, it would be good if users could not hijack this as a general purpose device BUT if everything else was doable at a very good price the security may matter less. There are other requirements but they can be handled as a superset to this description. More info as required. Russell --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .