Slashdot Mirror
Build Your Own MP3 Player
rdnk writes "Here's something for the DIY people, a home made mp3 player built into a mint case. Total (minimum) cost for parts: ~50$. At least it's something different."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
I've got a feeling, give it about 2-3 years, and mp3 players will be pretty cheap. This just proves that it could be done (limited) in a somewhat low cost method.
What I really wish would happen is someone would turn my cell phone, pda, and iPod into 1 good product that doesn't require me to take out a loan.
I know it's a dream. But how many more pockets do I have? I have my cell phone on my belt, pda in one, wallet, ipod... come on!
I'd be a bit more impressed if this person managed to squeeze an mp3 player into the battery of his phone (granted a bit bulkier), or PDA. That way it's possible to carry less, and have more.
I'm walking around like I have a "geek boner" in my pockets. With all those things in there.
Might be a danger of confusing it with the empty pack of mints in your pocket and tossing out the wrong one.
"Nyquil - The stuffy, sneezy, why-the-hell-is-the-room-spinning medicine."
This article was assertained from
/.'ers
www.hackaday.com
pretty cool stuff.. Especially the Coke machine Hack..
Have fun,,
Or a Frontier Labs NEX ia+ (don't have time to find link sorry)
It's an MP3 player that costs about $89, BYOCF. (Bring Your Own Compact Flash/microdrive), and runs off a pair of AAs. Also records microphone, radio direct to MP3.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
http://smallwonderlabs.com/Rockmite.htm
...
Mine is in an Altoids box and I added the audio filter from Steve Weber KD1JV and the Finger Tip Tapper flat iambic key! A REAL pocket size, compact 20 meter transceiver. I can talk to Europe while having lunch at the picnic table at work
You build stuff for yourself to learn and because it's satisfying to make stuff ... the same reason other people work in wood or in wool or whatever ... I think we forget this sort of stuff in our modern mass produced world.
And to your point - if it breaks you don't have to take it back ... you can fix it yourself.
Seeing Ada's article today was particularly usefull because I could show it to my daughter - her response was 'cool can I make one?', (she already has an MP3 player ... so it is the making not the having that's important here), being able to say I could say I vaguely knew Ada (from the long ago xenu-wars) was great too ... now my daughter want to go to MIT :-)
The cost of the kit is $150 + shipping.
On the order page it says:
So after adding a hard drive, cobbling together a useful power supply, and building a case for it, you are already well over $200.
Though it is fun to build things, you'd end up with a really crappy mp3 player, with an even lousier interface.
This reminds me of those ass-hats that make outdoor planters out of car or truck tires. Planting the flowers in the ground or in a simple raised bed would be far better looking.
The "ooh, look what I built" factor, in this case is overshadowed by the question "why?"
Why build something so lame and shoddy when for the same (or far less) money one can buy something far better, far more enjoyable to use.
The key feature for an MP3 player in my mind is the ability to integrate with existing audio systems. The iPod is getting there--some cars are now designed to use one. The next step is a (cheap) stereo component that you can plug an iPod into.
From Gizmodo, and a rebuttal. There is also a way to do it, albeit with a hack.
Engineer Dastardly Slaphapple took a break from his day job as a hardware and firmware designer at Bumbrubbley Audio Studebakery (maker of the iPod competitor Slompet player, among other things) to give us some more info on the OGG-on-iPod plausibility, including why the iPod mini (and future iPods) might have a better shot at getting OGG support than the older, whiter iPods. There's even information about why Apple may have chosen to implement their 'Lossless AAC' instead of the more widely adopted FLAC lossless format.
Dastardly's analysis after the jump:
Firstly, CPUs:
The current iPod gen3 has a PP5002D CPU, the same as the gen1 and gen2. The gen1/2 stored their code from flash, not SDRAM, meaning they had a more limited codesize, and their SDRAM took more power to operate.
The iPod mini has a PP5020 CPU
The Rio Karma (developed in Cambridge UK) uses a PP5003 CPU. It plays OGG (and FLAC and MP3 and WMA).
The old 5002:
The 5002 has a "broken" cache (1 wait state per access for program or data, meaning you effectively have half the effective clock rate when running code from external memory). This means that running code that doesn't fit in the internal 96kbyte SRAM of the player is very inefficient, both in terms of CPU cycles and power. MP3 and AAC just about squeeze into the internal memory (one at a time, obviously!), but anything that didn't would result in a big power hit - my guess is 30-40%+. This would be a bad user experience, considering the already short gen3 battery life.
The newer 5003:
The 5003 in the Karma has this particular silicon deficiency fixed. The Karma plays OGG, though it's still a resource hog - you get about 25% less battery life - about 11-12 hours compared to 15+ for MP3 due to the extra cycles and memory requirements when compared to the more svelte codecs. We didn't do a lot of optimisation, so it's running the Vorbis-supplied tremor decoder with only a few tweaks.
The even newer 5020:
The 5020 is based on the 5003, and so has the cache bug fixed. It's capable of playing OGG with 25% or less hit on power (depending how much optimisation is done). I would suspect the 5020 will find its way into the next iPod, as it's cheaper and integrates both the firewire MAC and the USB2 mac/phy blocks which are separate chips on the gen3.
So in summary:
gen3 - In theory possible, but unlikely. mini - Very possible. gen4 (or my guess at what a gen4 would have in it) - Very possible.
Dastardly Slaphapple is not speaking for his employer Bumbrubbley Audio Studebakery or Slompet Heavy Industries or anybody else. He's just sharing.
The ______ Agenda
Quote: For reasons still unknown to my conscious mind, I actually gave in to the hype and purchased an iPod 20GB, gen 4. Ever since then (it has been nearly 4 months now), I find that I can't live without the damned thing. Yea, I hear ya, Cobalt. I did exactly the same thing! In fact, I'm listening to the damn thing now. Even though I'm sitting at a perfectly good computer..... And I think I came even farther. There was a time that I didn't care about music much at all, let alone enough to shell out $300 for a device dedicated almost completely to MP3 playback....although it's also useful as a hard disk!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
What the hell are you doing here if you don't have an interest in either computer programming, electronic circuit design or soe other aspect of engineering? If you don't have an interest in any of that, then you are personally one of the reasons why Slashdot sucks so bad these days. There was a time when they actually had "news for nerds, stuff that matters". Now it's just news for poseurs.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o