Background

I have noticed in the discussions recently, that it looks like there isn't a very bright future for the N3. I, like many others in the community, initially got involved with Neuros because of their line of portable audio players, ultimately, the N2. When initial development began on the OSD, there was always the issue of the N3 looming about, with no progress towards it. Instead of moping over the situation, I have a plan on how we can make the N3 a reality.

This represents my vision on how the community can build an N3. It is an initial push in what I consider an interesting direction, intended to instigate thought and stir discussion. It is not the gospel of the N3. This is a pretty big project, and would need community support to be a success.

The Idea

I have a new vision for the N3. It is a community-built product. The entire thing, from head to toe, will be built on the community process. Community members and a hardware engineer will take the current schematics (and layout, if we can get it) of the OSD, shrink it for use in a portable device, while adding an LCD, battery power, great audio support, and FM radio broadcast support. Some of the existing components will be removed: at least ethernet, we will decide on a single flash device and the TV hardware.

The software for the device will be completely written or ported by the community. It is, in fact, outside the immediate scope of this project. This project is to get us the hardware. There are many possible solutions for the software, from a port of Rockbox, to a modification of the OSD software, to a completely new design.

An important aspect of this project is that it will be completely open source. We will not use closed source codecs, nor vendor versions of existing open source code.

Features Needed

• LCD
• Battery (life is undecided, but at least should be able to record 4 - hours or so)
• Any hardware changes needed for low power operation - FM transmitter
• Battery charger (uses USB connector?)
• USB charging - Audio quality (new ADC/DAC?)
• Would a headphone preamp make sense?
• Hardware to support high quality mic input
• Would digital in/out make sense? (multichannel?)
• Reasonably small form factor

Funding

This will make or break the project, and other ideas are appreciated. We could take pre-orders, but that probably would not amount to much. I guess first we'd need to figure out exactly what we need the hardware engineer to do, and how much that would cost. Also, there is the cost of the enclosure production (and setup?), and the prototype board production. Perhaps we could use the SoC mentor money as a seed, but we would need quite a bit more than that. Lots of work to be done here.

Rough Outline of Objectives

• Phase I - Solidify the design. Settle on a feature set.
• Phase II - Identify parts. Given the features we want, what parts will get us those features given space and power constraints?
• Phase III - Figure out how much money phases IV, V and VI are going to take.
• *Phase IV - Integrate the selected parts into the schematic. Also, make sure things are setup for as little power use as possible.
• *Phase V - Shrinkage. Figure out how to make the thing portable.
• Phase VI - Enclosure. (could also need professional support here)
• *Phase VII - Manufacturing support. We will get the boards built and tested.
• Phase VIII - Dev boards. We have working hardware and can start selling dev boards. The project is complete. Now the community can start getting the software going.

(*) This phase will require the support of a hardware engineer. If we can't find one in the community, we will have to explore options on how best to hire one.

Possibilities

Can we make a couple of smart design decision to help enable a lower cost version of the device? Scrap the high quality audio stuff, just include a normal DAC/ADC, maybe even drop input. In a similar fashion, maybe there is a similar style in which a HD version could be made. This would only be worth pursuing if there was a way to get all these similar products from the same base board design.

Neuros' Involvement

This is a Neuros community project. The goal is to get a N3 dev board out, and Neuros has many ways it can help make that happen. Neuros has a lot to offer: manufacturing, helping find or supplying the hardware engineer, enclosure design, reality checks.

If the dev board is any success, Neuros is free to do what they wish with the product.

Conclusion

The whole idea here is that we can leverage the schematics of the OSD to build the N3 cheaply, with few hardware modifications. If that is not an achievable goal, this project won't succeed. Since this is a community project, it can proceed at its own pace, and there will not be pressure to get a product out.

Are other people in the community interested in this idea, even if not the specifics? Please, post your own vision, or what tweaks you would like to see to mine.