Slashdot Mirror
Build Portable Mp3 Player
Greenpiece/Toasty writes: "Build your own portable MP3 player around 8000-9000 Yen. Uses 32 Megabyte flash media cards its the ultimate in geek. The link can be found here with circuit diagrams and pictures of the finished product. The kit can also be bought, but not from that page; another company is manufacturing it in Japan. The board seems quite easy to manufacture. "
I hope that the MP3 player kit comes complete with a properly fabricated and well designed printed circuit board. Of course, you can always design your own PCB using shareware software (I don't know if there is any GPL'ed stuff to do PCB design), but it takes a fair bit of skill to do a good PCB design and you'll need to know someone who can etch the PCB for you. PCB etching equipment isn't cheap!
But all this talk of MP3 players and electronics is pretty dull. I'm far more excited that Stone Cold Steve Austin is back at the WWF Pay Per View this Sunday. Austin 3:16 is back, I can't wait! Oh, man!
is this from your referral log?= PASSWORD&unickname=NICKNAME
something like: http://slashdot.org/index.pl?op=userlogin&upasswd
If so, it does say that this method of logging in is *very* insecure.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
http://www.paia.com are perfectly positioned to make kits like this available, I think.
It'd rock.
I'm off to spec out components.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Anyone see it? Can orders be placed?
I want to build this thing, but it'd be nice if the company that's making the kit had a URL...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
It sure looks like the overall set of hardware is the same set that the vendors of all the MP3 players are using.
It seems likely to me that this is not merely "similar" hardware, but really is the same hardware. And if that be the case, once the MPAA foists "copy control clients" on the industry, those clients will be happy to update the "firmware" on the MP3 players, whether they're boxed units from Sony or Panasonic, or a custom job that you built yourself.
Not that it'shoul affect my Diamond Rio; I use the open source "SnowBlind Alliance" interface software, and merely upload files.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Sure, it might be more economical for those people who charge by the hour for their services to just go buy one... But this little project looks like it would be fun to do!
The ballpark rule that I use is that a yen is more or less equivalent to a US penny.
That will get you in the range within a few dollars.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Part of "Hack Value" is creating something that either isn't available elsewhere, or being able to put something together for far less than buying it at the shops. It's not about re-inventing the wheel. If you just want to say that you built it with your own hands you're not a hacker, you're an enthusiest. Same thing if you're just putting together something that's a slightly higher quality.
Now, if you take a cheap old Rio and solder in 128MB of RAM that you salvaged from something else cheaply, you're a hacker.
CompactFlash is much easier to handle than SmartMedia... I'm the kind of person that scratches CDs easily, and I'd be scared to have those (relatively) delicate SmartMedia cards. Can anyone here adapt this hack ("hack this hack"?) to be able to use CompactFlash? Plus, there are more applications for CompactFlash (The TRGPro for example) that would offset the cost of an IBM MicroDrive.
Could this control a Hard drive as well? It'd be nice to be able to make your own EMPEG type device.. Throw on your own LCD and one of these monsters and you're set. 75 Gigs of MP3 storage. Is there a better way to do this than with these schematics?
Then don't build one.
Go buy a rio, with solidly soldered circuit boards hidden away beneath a nice shiny black case; a mass-produced masterpiece designed by some faceless intrepid entity toiling away in a forgotten corporate cubicle. You will gain an excellent warranty, a pretty cardboard box, and a nice pair of cheap earphones in the process.
But if you take as much joy from the melting of metal as you do from the music itself, if you dream of harnassing the secrets of the universe for your own personal pleasure, then this kind of thing is the only option. Nothing my mother can buy at Wal-Mart will be as exciting or as interesting as something I piece together out of scraps of metal, a broken Walkman and a radio shack chip.
I had no interest whatsoever in portable mp3 players until building my own became a possibility. I don't yet have the skill to design one of these myself- but I can solder, and I think I can read a schematic well enough to put this thing together. I can probably even modify this to do other neat things- and in doing that, I will learn a great deal.
Or maybe you already know everything there is to know about electrical engineering. Maybe you can design one of these in your sleep, and that is why this doesn't excite you. If that's the case, do it. And then put up a web page and show me how- cuz I am excited.
Rev Neh
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
Works in IE 5 as well.. Damn, that's uncool..
.sig: Now legally binding!
Hoeee! n.n
:) When I saw Sakura on there my eyes bulged out :) I don't give a rat's ass about the technical merits of this thing, the look is enough for me to get it. I emailed the guy asking him if he'd make one for me for a profit.
Damn straight
Obviously you Don't Get It. So give your money to somebody else and don't worry about it. Let the people that want to hack a cool embedded system have some fun.
IMnsHO, I'll learn more than the ~$50-100 dollars I'll save over buying a ready-made MP3 player and that's more than a fair tradeoff.
I reckon we all should have just used existing computers and operating systems 'cuz they're just another clone that provide the same functionality.
Dave
Why do I care? Well, because, I don't see IBM being able to squeeze their 340 MB Microdrive into a Smartmedia form factor anytime soon.
Other than that, what a cool project! This is the stuff Slashdot outta have more of!
Free music from Jack Merlot.
How can I purchase a single MAS3507D chip in the United States? www.intermetall.de says that www.symmetryla.com is their North American reseller, but it also says that their resellers only sell in quantities of at least 50. The site also said that www.conrad.de sells smaller quantities of the chip in Europe, but I can't find anyone who sells smaller quantities in the US. -Paolo, paolo0 at yahoo dot com
I'm about to start building my own car computer/stereo, and I really feel as though I must have something more flexible than a hardware MPEG decoder. For example, I am very excited about Vorbis OGG, and plan to use and support it heavily if it does turn out to be better than MP3. Why should I build a player that saves me a few $$, only to have to replace parts later when a newer, better encoding standard arrives?
I'm starting out with an M590 motherboard from PCWare. True, PCWare doesn't make the highest quality mobos in the world, but my experience is that if you get one that works, it tends to keep working. This mobo has onboard sound and video (linux supported!), and so will allow me to place it in a relatively flat case (no cards to worry about). My friend has developed a library to interface with 3-line text LCDs, so that they can display menus while selecting and audio meters while playing; it's open source (all of his stuff is), and you can find it at http://www.mobydisk.com
I was originally thinking of using hard disk storage to avoid swapping media all the time, but since hard disks of sufficient durability are not available at a reasonable size/price ration, I'm going with a CD-ROM for now. One CD-R will hold FAR more than a Rio...I can put Linux on a small solid-state hard disk, and I'm set! For power, an adaptor from car-DC to computer-AC is not terribly expensive.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
You know what would be really cool, if I could get somewhere a good design and instructions to rebuild one of those CD players into an MP3 CD player. I want one, I want one BAD. Everyone promisses one and NOBODY delivers. :(
You can't handle the truth.
First of all, nuts to those who do the "I'm first" crap. Secondly, this looks like a very do-able project. While it may be even more geek to design your own board and program your own controller/processor, this looks accessible to the less esoteric among us.
*everything* is Orwellian to cats.
Sure, you can get a Rio for 100 Bucks at an auction site, but where is the fun in that.
Building this seems like a great project. I am gonna give this one a go!. I am gonna try to tweak the case design though (see if I can't cram it into an empty smoke pack, or can of Spam) That would rock eh? the Spam Brand MP3 Player? Hey, If you can get a Linux Server in a Pizza Box, then why not a Spam MP3 Player!
If anyone knows of any similar projects, I'd sure like to know (click here to mail me)
Lotteries are a tax for people who suck at math.
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
(Is it me, or do others detect a "glut" of designs that are almost identical to the Rio?)
I don't see much point in having to integrate my own "Rio" when it provides no more functionality.
If the design provided some reasonable way of storing 1GB of data, cheaply, that sure would be interesting.
But another "me too!" design integrating together a synthesizer, some simple CPU/DSP, parallel interface, and a 32MB chunk of "flash" memory just does not excite.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You can get the same thing, with a warrenty for about the same price... It's called a 'Rio' :>
Picked mine up at an online auction site for about $50...
http://www.wantads.com
They always have a buttload of em.
I prefer a variant of your method, sir. I like dividing by 10 first. Then I only have to move the decimal over 1 place, saving me some time and effort!
--
"And is the Tao in the DOS for a personal computer?"
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
A MP3 player kit can be bought here with details here from the company Wakamat Su. Note: The page is in Japanese, but you can feel your way around and get the gist. Can someone translate?
My email is real.
Well, not exactly the cheapest, but for what it offers, it's amazing...
:P
My car came with a pretty good casette player, so I didn't want to replace it. Instead, I got a casette adapter from Future Shop, that plugs into the line out of any cd player/sound card. I also bought a lighter power adapter for my old Thinkpad laptop.
The total cost for the adapters and laptop was around $600CAD, which is pretty steep. But I get to play mp3s in my car off my mp3 cds, and have a laptop that is usefull for something other than just that.
So IMHO, this is the best solution to having a car mp3 player. Feel free to disagree though...
For those of us who don't have a yen for learning exchange rates (ha ha):
Today 108 yen = 1 USD.
So 8000-9000 yen = $74-$83
--
Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Soundbastard
"Oh, YARC (Yet Another Rio Clone)."
"Oh, I can get a Rio for the same amount."
Pah. A pox on you and your like. Whatever happened to pure HACK VALUE? Sorry, but building the equivalent of a commercial machine for fun is neat, fun, and educational.
Go buy your little Rio and leave the real hackers be.
Dave