Specifications

Chapter 7 - Future Improvements
The previous chapters have outline how the idea for the thesis came about and how the
idea was developed in to fully functional MP3 player. Not all aspects of the MP3 player
were implemented in way that fulfilled the ideal specifications that were outlined in
Chapter 3. Chapter 7 deals with the features that were not yet implemented and also the
extra features that could be added to the design.
7.1 Improvements to the Current Design.
When looking at the ideal specifications, the implemented design does not allow the
user to create and edit the play list from the device itself. To be able to do this in future
revisions are larger display and keypad with more buttons is required. The graphical
user interface will then need to be developed on this platform. To get the information
required for the interface the player will need to be able to navigate through the
computers on the network and browse their directory structures. MP3 files would be
selected and stored on the player. To get this information the player can either use the
existing server program and expand its features, or interact with Windows itself.
Interacting with Windows itself is the ideal implementation as no PC software is
required, making the player autonomous. To achieve all of the features on top of the
existing design a more powerful platform will be require. Implementing the MP3
players own interface to the Windows file system will require more resources than the
current Ethernut will provide. The solution is to use the latest hardware revision of the
Ethernut. It uses an 11Mhz processor and provides 64Kbytes of RAM. The current MP3
player software that was developed can simply be installed on this newer Ethernut and it
will work. Development can then continue on top of the existing solution to provide the
extra features.
66