The Sansa Clip Zip is the Sansa Clip+ replacement. Like the Clip+, it is based on the AS3525v2 SOC as can be seen by checking the AMS header on the firmware file:The format does not appear to have changed significantly, as amsinfo happily unpacks the firmware revealing nearly the same firmware contents as the Fuzev2, with the addition of a few extra decoders and such. Since this appears to be another SansaAMS device, lets reuse that wiki:Theres also some hardware information here:I'm too busy these days to contribute much to a port, but if someone else wants to take the lead on this I might be willing to chip in a bit. Anythingbutipod has a nice comparison between the clip+ and the clipzip:The relevant differences with the clip+ so far seem to be so far just the different display and RDS support.The display is a 96x96 pixels colour LCD and in the abi article it shows some horizontal lines around high brightness features of the screen, which could point to it being a passive matrix lcd like in the sansa c200.The radio has RDS support, possibly they are using a si4703 variant instead of the usual si4702 tuner chip (just a guess so far). Oddly I don't see a mention of RDS in the sansa clip zip user manual or on their product page. Ok, a basic framework has been committed.
This makes it possible to at least.compile. a bootloader for the clip zip.
The driver for the LCD and backlight is still a stub (i.e. Empty functions). The driver for the buttons should basically work except the GPIO-to-button mapping is probably wrong (so UP may be LEFT, etc.)I also updated mkamsboot to recognise the original firmware file for patching it with the rockbox bootloader. You can't actually create a flashable firmware yet because the dualboot part is still missing. The dualboot code is the code that checks a button/USB connection to decide whether either the original firmware or the rockbox bootloader should be started. This is tricky stuff because any error in this part can potentially brick the player so any new dualboot code needs thorough review.Marvin the Martian has posted some screen shots from the diagnostic menu on the clip+:This basically confirms that 1) diagnostic menu is still available 2) the DRAM memory configuration is the same as on the clip+ 3) it still uses a silabs tuner (si4702 or compatible) and 4) apparently the internal name of the hardware is 'visionox'.The clip zip appears to support RDS, so perhaps sandisk put in an si4703 tuner chip.
This is basically a si4702 (which we already support in rockbox) with RDS capability added. Rockbox for the Clip Zip now boots and can play audio. The code for this is in SVN.Beware that several things don't work yet, or don't work properly, see the SansaClip wiki.For example, the display colours are wrong, it seems red and blue are swapped.Audio playback works, but it takes up to 10 seconds for the first track to start.This target seems to have the narrowest display we've seen so far. There is no WPS yet for the 96x96 pixel display. To be able to run plugins, many plugins will first need to be updated for the 96x96 resolution.
The hardware for RDS is there (at least in my player). Reception of RDS requires a pretty strong and clear signal as far as I know. In the original firmware I get a kind of station code (like 'WREO'), the 8-character station name and a longer string with other info.In rockbox, we can perhaps use the station code to select station 'album art'.RDS sends data in 4x16-bit packets, the code to process these packets into useful information has not been written yet for rockbox. I plan a kind of generic approach, where the fm tuner driver can submit these raw RDS packets and receive notification when a full RDS message is complete.BTW, the display colours are now what they're supposed to be and the delay when starting a track is gone. I just test drove Rockbox on my 4 GB Zip and had both of those problems. There was either an excess of blue or an absence of yellow on my display, but I could normalize it somewhat by resetting the colors.Can't speak for why the track delay is happening, but I tried shuffling all of my tracks and there was a good 5-6 seconds before each one started when skipped.I used the current build (r30890), the Win32 version of mkamsboot, the 01.01.17 OF and the pre-compiled bootloader which dfkt made available here:. I would have compiled the bootloader myself but, as far as I can tell, no 'bootloader-clipzip.sansa' file has been released yet.What could I be doing wrong?
Actually, the colour problem and the playback delay problem should both be fixed now.Album art colours seem a bit washed out, but that's just a hardware limitation I think.(Although maybe we can adjust gamma for to adjust the subjective contrast?)The Clip Zip can have two different kinds of display, so far we've seen only the Visionox type (visible in the diagnostics menu of the original firmware flashed with a 'T' suffix). The other kind (WiseChip) has not been seen yet 'in the wild', but there is a driver for it.
If/when the newer display type shows up, it will probably not work completely right. Actually, the colour problem and the playback delay problem should both be fixed now.Album art colours seem a bit washed out, but that's just a hardware limitation I think.(Although maybe we can adjust gamma for to adjust the subjective contrast?)The Clip Zip can have two different kinds of display, so far we've seen only the Visionox type (visible in the diagnostics menu of the original firmware flashed with a 'T' suffix). The other kind (WiseChip) has not been seen yet 'in the wild', but there is a driver for it. If/when the newer display type shows up, it will probably not work completely right.
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Sansa Zip Clip
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