[geeks] WebPals for $9.99 + S/H (link to reseller)

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Mon, Oct 13, 2003 at 09:00:14PM -0400, Thomas Gallaway wrote:
> On Monday, October 13, 2003, at 08:46  PM, Mike Hebel wrote:
> >
> >Looking at these again I _do_ see a use for them - in car MP3 players. 
> > The CF cards and maybe an IDE drive would make them ideal for this.
> 
> After what I did gather on information the WebPals have a weird audio 
> chip and the processor is not fast enough to decode
> mp3.

The D/A doesn't look all that strange to me.  I'd even venture to say
it's a pretty common one.  Now, what is odd is that according to some
web sites the clock signal being sent to the D/A is slow.   I doubt that
all that many people would notice, but I could be wrong about the effect
of the  audio playing 2% slower than it should.  Software could
certainly accomodate this.

As to the CPU speed for playing MP3s, I think it should be easy to do,
but I could be wrong, and haven't tried.  I wonder if using mpg123 is
really the right way to approach it though. ARM chips don't have FPUs.
Mpg123 supposedly uses floating point math, which means it would be
quite slow.  ARM themselves used to distribute example code for playing
MP3s on their chips.  I don't know how easy it is to get anymore.