Home brew MP3 player.

May 17, 2000 12:58 PM

Home brew MP3 player. All we need now is for someone to make a cdr version instead of smartmedia (AIWA has one for the car).
posted by jamescblack (8 comments total)

Why does the bleeding thing look like someone took apart a toaster and stuck ear phone jacks inside? I thought these things were supposed to me more high tech and all that ?
posted by tiaka at 1:20 PM on May 17, 2000

Considering that it's homebrew, I'd say that even though ID expectations are low, the delivery is better than most homebrew work I've seen.
posted by plinth at 1:42 PM on May 17, 2000

the outside looks ok, but the insides is what i'm talking about.
posted by tiaka at 2:19 PM on May 17, 2000

There's also the Brownworth Box, or Route66, a project to build a lite PC running Linux that can be an in-car MP3 player.

Tiaka, all electronics look like that naked, sheesh. It's just a breadboard. The top picture shows a case with a manga image.
posted by dhartung at 2:57 PM on May 17, 2000

yes, but my name is felix, whatever.
I know that's how everything looks underneath, but i would imagine this being more complex somehow, take apart my 2 year old walk-man, it looks more advanced. I think the player itself is great sure, if it works it works and all that sorta stuff, i was just commenting on my views. is all.
posted by tiaka at 4:00 PM on May 17, 2000

James, this is a good guide for mp3-playing hardware. There's 71 entries just in the portables section, several working off off CDR, like the MomboX and the D'Music. These are all commercial, though, I don't know if you meant homebrew specifically.
posted by Freakho at 5:22 PM on May 17, 2000

All it is is a circuit board and a memory card. That's the least-possible high-tech looking kind of tech stuff you can get, really.

It's simplicity, and non-descript techiness design are what make it really really elegant, in my mind. :-)
posted by cCranium at 6:48 PM on May 17, 2000

The reason why your walkman looks more "advanced" is that it is wildly cost-reduced. Cost-reduced means that if they disocvered that using 6 transistors costs less than an integrated op-amp, they will use transistors (individual transistors are something like $0.04 in bulk and a dual op-amp will be like $.40). If they use the flat-pack models, you'll get that slim low-profile look. I think its cool that he managed a 3 chip solution. Further, the Atmel chip is $7 (although in bulk, that's probably more like $5), the Micronas chips are butt-expensive in small quantities (mostly to discourage this type of work or for them to make up money on the support sink they'll have as a result of doing small quantities), but I'd expect that they'd be $15 in bulk. The rest is about $5, so you're looking at $25 in parts, give or take $5. Not bad.
posted by plinth at 6:23 AM on May 18, 2000