[Consortium] Re: Streetfiresound RBX 1600

[Daniel James]

Hi Stephen,

> I continue to get requests to purchase RBX1600 but have not figured
> out what to do about the inquiries.
>
> Some random thoughts in no particular order:
>
> - Seed a development community with free RBX1600's.
>
> - Sell RBX1600 at steep (50% below actual costs) as audio
> development systems with limited or no support.

A third option could be to sell them at cost (why should you lose 
out?) as part of an open source project for pro-quality media 
servers. That way the software stack could continue to be developed, 
even if the RBX1600 hardware isn't in production. 

The software could then run on other embedded hardware, or even a 
recycled PC, although I appreciate that the CD jukebox control 
hardware is probably specialised. Is there an equivalent interface on 
a PCI card or perhipheral? I don't know of a low-cost way to provide 
multiple optical inputs either, but I suspect as the cost of storage 
continues to fall, RAID arrays will take the place of CD jukeboxes.

There are other projects working on media servers and broadcast 
automation which you could augment, for example:

http://freevo.sourceforge.net/
http://www.salemradiolabs.com/rivendell/

> The current RBX1600 software stack is dependent on a Linux port
> from MontaVista and a propertary JVM from IBM.  I no longer have
> access to updates from MontaVista.  I do have rights to some 900+
> IBM licenses but this is not an open source solution.

You might like to consider embedded Debian as an alternative:

http://www.emdebian.org/twiki/bin/view

Cheers!

Daniel