RENKFORCE FM-16

Car cigarette plug mounted & powered USB + SD card reader + Audio input, to Radio FM transmitter

http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/txt/renkforce-fm-16.html

Notes by Julian Stacey (Other Texts)

• Features
  • Slot for SD/MMC cards (max. 2GByte; SDHC is not possible)
  • USB socket - dont power discs off it!
  • 2.5mm stereo jack socket + cable with 2.5mm & 3.5mm plugs.
  • Back lit LCD
• The frequency stepping of the transmitter seems to work.
• Input by cable (from an external mp3 player): Worked fine,
  Next to office radio it sounded OK, after switching radio from Stereo to Mon to kill hiss from computers). Further away a lot more hiss (well it has to be a low power transmitter to be allowed to transmit.
• Input from SD Card
  • Manual says it wont recognise some SD/MMC cards or USB sticks, so I tested:
  • 256 M Sandisk Card: Success
  • 8 Meg Panasonic SD card:
    • Failed initially with FAT12, with a single mp3 in top, then in a sub directory, it did not recognise card.
    • fdisk /dev/da0 showed: sysid 1 (0x01),(Primary DOS with 12 bit FAT) (Which is either how they came from factory or how one of my cameras formatted them.)
    • sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16
    • fdisk -i /dev/da0 # sysid 6
    • newfs_msdos -F 16 /dev/da0s1
      newfs_msdos: 1526 clusters too few clusters for FAT16, need 4096
    • newfs_msdos -F 16 -c 2 /dev/da0s1
      /dev/da0s1: 12174 sectors in 6087 FAT16 clusters (1024 bytes/cluster)
      BytesPerSec=512 SecPerClust=2 ResSectors=1 FATs=2 RootDirEnts=512 Sectors=12256 Media=0xf0 FATsecs=24 SecPerTrack=32 Heads=64 HiddenSecs=0
    • Then it played OK.
  • 16M Canon SDC-16M card
    • Failed initially with FAT12, both with 1 mp3 in top & 1 mp3 in a sub dir.
    • sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16
    • fdisk -i /dev/da0 # sysid 6
    • newfs_msdos -F 16 /dev/da0s1
      newfs_msdos: 3572 clusters too few clusters for FAT16, need 4096
    • newfs_msdos -F 16 -c 4 /dev/da0s1
      /dev/da0s1: 28548 sectors in 7137 FAT16 clusters (2048 bytes/cluster)
      BytesPerSec=512 SecPerClust=4 ResSectors=1 FATs=2 RootDirEnts=512 Sectors=28640 Media=0xf0 FATsecs=28 SecPerTrack=32 Heads=64 HiddenSecs=0
    • Then it played OK.
  • Wikipedia article on Secure Digital SD Card format Extract:
    The SDSC (Standard-Capacity) card family, commonly known as SD, has an official maximum capacity of 2GB, though some are available up to 4 GB.[2] The SDHC (High-Capacity) card family have a capacity of 4 GB to 32 GB.[3] SDXC (eXtended-Capacity) card family have a capacity starting above 32 GB with a maximum capacity of 2 TB.[4][5] The availability of 4 GB capacity in both the SD and SDHC families have caused much compatibility confusion with users since each has a slightly different communication protocol.

• Input from USB Sticks:

• The manual says Max 2Gig Sticks.
• "Myflash" 512 MB stick: Success
  
  vendor 0x0457 ; product 0x0150 ; devclass 0x00 ; devsubclass 0x00 ; release 0x0100
  I erased the BSD file system I had previous put on stick, & wrote an MSDOS FAT-16, using:

  sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16
  fdisk -i /dev/da0 # I told it ID=6
  newfs_msdos -F 16 /dev/da0s1

  Manual says do not format media in NTFS format. Only use FAT16 or FAT32.

  • A 4 Gig USB stick just flickered with "Waiting" on screen.
    Stick purchased from Mueller, detail:
    vendor 0x058f , product 0x6387 ; devclass 0x00 ; devsubclass 0x00 ; intclass 0x08