Yesterday I wandered into an electronics store intending to buy nothing and walked out with an old computer, a “dmx ProFusion X Digital Media Manager”.
From what I can tell this was designed to play music in a store. On the back it has connectors that convert the standard 3.5mm audio outpus to RCA’s that I’m assuming go to amplifiers.
When I walked to the register with the PC, the clerk was wondering why the machine was on the floor in the first place. He told me he couldn’t sell it because the hard drive was still installed and still had music on it. I asked if he could sell it without the hard drive, he agreed, ripped it out, and I was on my way.
It came running a VIA C3 CPU at 800MHz and with a whopping 128MB of DDR333, but it came in a nice case for a project. It’s face has 7 buttons and an LCD. It attempts to display a DMX banner as soon as power is applied. By attempts I mean that about half of the display is dead.
Inside, the front panel is powered using a floppy disk style power connector and interfaces using a 10 pin ribbon that occupies two a 2 port USB header on the motherboard. The USB device presents itself as a standard FTDI serial to USB interface. After some trial and error, I discovered that it runs at 19.2k baud and the buttons are mapped to send a single digit for each:
- Style Up
- Style Down
- Left:
- Up
- *
- Down
- Right
When I send text to the display at the same baud rate it appears to display on the LCD, but since the display is broken it’s hard to see if the correct text is displayed, and I haven’t found what to send the display to set or reset the cursor position or clear the display.
I replaced the motherboard with and old socket 757 motherboard and a 1.8ghz AMD CPU, and I plan to make this a music jukebox at some point. It’s burried deep on my todo list for now and if I come up with anything worth sharing I certainly will.
thanks for this info. i also have the same system as you with no hard drive. what os are you using to run this system? i want to get it back up and running as a media player.
Sadly this keeps getting buried deeper on my to-do list. It’s still there though, so maybe one day I’ll get around to it.
I imagine some light-weight Linux distro will be the best starting point. The most time consuming part will be choosing a flexible music player and building something that will listen to the serial port for the button presses and write track info back over serial to drive the display.
Good luck!
Did you ever finish you build on it? picked one up today and came across this
I can confirm that it has a Linux system on it, however i have NO idea what to do in order to reset it in some way in order to place my own music on it.
Looked on the net and i havent found any guides on what to do 🙁
Did you ever get anywhere with it? picked one up today and it plays whats on it fine, would love to be able to make something to navigate using the lcd
I just found one today at my local Salvation Army store and snagged it for $8 due to the LCD being illegible. Complete with hard drive. I plan on using the case for an HTPC setup and may oray not keep the drive depending on its storage capacity. All the internals I will part with though so if needed let me know
I just found one bnib if you need one I have