techdesign.be — create your own flash memory based mp3 player. Sounds pretty fun, the kit without a memory card is about 88 dollars. It can run on either MMC or SD memory cards with sizes up to 1GB - I recommend newegg for good prices on these - around 52 bucks.
Feb 3, 2006 View in Crawl 4
simply_jFeb 3, 2006
Way back in the day, Patrick Norton did a piece on Screen Savers about making a DIY MP3 player with a 3.5" IDE hard drive. He stored the whole thing in a shoebox. Pretty cool.Good article. But No Digg for mentioning "iPod"
sithviciousFeb 3, 2006
jesus you people are picky. digg just for the DIY factor of it. it looks like a great project.
thyratronFeb 3, 2006
While it seems like a fun rainy day project, the result sure won't be anywhere near as nice as an iPod. I was trying to think of some advantage of this over the real thing, and ruled out cost. The best I could come up with is it being much less of a target for thieves.Something done well for the car might make more sense. Something with a big 3.5" hard drive could give more storage than an iPod for a very low price. It's still lack the great interface and iTunes integration though. Maybe it'd be worth finding an early iPod cheap somewhere and hacking to add a huge drive to it? I think the drives had special firmware, but there ought to be someone that can figure out how to do it. People have had Linux running on iPods!
thyratronFeb 3, 2006
The level of detail for building this is better than I expected, but I see one serious drawback. The code needed for the microcontroller isn't open-source. They sell it, and for much more than what the chip costs. (I can't judge the price, I guess I need a currency-converter Widget) If the guys want to make money from kits, charging for the circuit boards seems like the best way. Most people don't want to deal with manufacturing that. Soldering is no big deal. It does sound like an expensive programmer may be needed to load the code into the chip.It'd be really great with open-source, then we could collectively make it better through sharing our improvements
fillllllFeb 3, 2006
looks like complete s**t
Closed AccountFeb 8, 2006
ROFL @ goliath!