do you have some advanced electronics skills, 50 bucks, a spare altoids tin, and the need to out-cool your ipod toting friends? if so, check out limor’s instructions for building an mp3 player from scratch. it uses compact flash, has a built-in fm transmitter, and smells real nice. awesome!
i don’t believe so. maybe you are thinking of the altoids battery pack at http://www.hackaday.com/entry/2645310329796286/
Posted at 12:48 pm on Jan 13th, 2005 by jason striegel
wonder if anyone would be able to add an LCD to this design.. ??
Posted at 12:56 pm on Jan 13th, 2005 by mart
Wow! The perfect hack for an electrical engineering student. Thx
Posted at 12:56 pm on Jan 13th, 2005 by hbogart
yeah, this was on the same site as that persistence of vision toy that was posted a while back:
http://www.hackaday.com/entry/4215556122376433/
“yeah, this was on the same site as that persistence of vision toy that was posted a while back:”
THAT’S why this seems so familier.
No biggie.
Posted at 2:34 pm on Jan 13th, 2005 by Al
I have to say that I am very impressed by this. Very Original
Posted at 4:04 pm on Jan 13th, 2005 by Murray
The dude that came up with this is great. He seems to think everyone who reads his site know what he’s talking about. :P Building an mp3 player from scratch is a teeeeeeny bit too advanced for me.
Posted at 5:47 pm on Jan 13th, 2005 by Greg
It looks like there is a lot for an lcd. or at least a small display like you see on a calulator. it also depends on what info teh mp3 decoder chip keeps and what it throws away. it’s possible that no info for a text output is saved.
Man i want to make one
Posted at 5:47 pm on Jan 13th, 2005 by Ted
The track data for mp3 files is stored at the end of the file in plain text; you don’t need a decoder for that. If you wanted to display track information you would just jump so many bytes from the end of the file, check to see if the “flag” is there that indications the track contains extra information, and if found just display its contents. Check out http://id3.org for more information.
Posted at 7:48 pm on Jan 13th, 2005 by Joel Johnson
this project is really meant for advanced EE hackers, its not meant for beginners at all. a project like the MiniPOV is way more in-line with what the average hacker can pull together in a week.
Posted at 8:05 pm on Jan 13th, 2005 by ladyada
If anyone is interested in audio DIY, you shold check ot fixup.net and head-fi.com
I’m an audio diy’er and I make stuff liek this all the time. I wouldn’t ever make a diy mp3 player, but this an absolutely impresive project. I would like to see more pics of the desigs, including inside pron, btu nothing here looks fraudulent.
I love to see people making their own stuff and promote audiophile diy all the way.
great job hackaday!
BILL
Posted at 8:56 pm on Jan 13th, 2005 by BILL
I already order most of the samples I could get. Only need the usb to serial (not really) and the mp3 decoder. If only she finishes the build page….
Besides, I think i need to get a compact flash adaptor
Posted at 3:00 am on Jan 14th, 2005 by CDE
actually the USB to serial chip is a minor nuscance since they are on a new revision which has a different pinout getting the B is important. ( and a pain.. since if you can’t find it on ebay.. you probably have to go to the authorized distributors which will sell only in a min quantity of 6).
I will agree it’s an advanced project.. but I like way to hard challenges.. I’m currently trying to get the damn chip to program.. ( after slowly planning my shit over the past few months)..
Posted at 9:32 am on Jan 14th, 2005 by dan
I have emailed ladyada to get a detail parts list and to see when the fabrication part will be finished, and she emailed me back. It seems she has her thesis due at the moment, so she gave it about a month for us to see a finished tutorial. Cheers.
Posted at 5:44 pm on Jan 14th, 2005 by CDE
(due to overwhelming complaints :)
i posted a BOM for the current revision with price list and numbers as well as two other mp3 projects that might be more reasonable for hackers, & that come with kits.
also, the FT232BM is available for pretty cheap from DonTronics. Best of luck…
ladyada — amazing. thank you!
Posted at 12:55 am on Jan 15th, 2005 by jason striegel
any one got a mirro
its currently being /.ed
Posted at 10:20 pm on Jan 15th, 2005 by drlzrdmn
Some one help me out here; where can I buy solderpaste. I have plenty of solder, but had never heard of solder paste until I saw this project.
Posted at 11:23 pm on Jan 15th, 2005 by Joel Johnson
Solderpaste? You mean flux? Try Radioshack, or Fry’s depending where you at
Posted at 12:22 am on Jan 16th, 2005 by CDE
Nope, I mean paste, not flux. Flux is used to remove oxidation. LadyYada referenced “solder paste” in a picture in the fabrication section. I did another search and found this black & decker reflow oven that she mentioned. It looks that these things are not counter top device. They are about the size of four or five laser printers line up.
I found some places that sell it on the web. Solder past has solder flux as one of its components along with grains of solder. All of the references I find to it involve industrial equipment; if I were to trade in my car I couldn’t afford that stuff. but I’m crappy with SMT soldering :’(
Posted at 12:24 pm on Jan 16th, 2005 by Joel Johnson
she also suggested high quality silver solder which is easier to obtain than solder paste.
(all you need to do is apply the silver solder to the contact points before applying the chips and just apply heat ontop of the pins.
)
Posted at 2:51 pm on Jan 16th, 2005 by dan
In that case, a trip to a local Engineering college could be useful in finding people who can help you. My roommate is getting the board made for me, along with soldering the ic chips and programming the pic. EE and CE is useful for something it seems ^_^
Posted at 12:20 am on Jan 17th, 2005 by CDE
I found the solder paste!!!
Radioshack sells it under the description “Solder Weld.” It comes in a small overpriced quantity in a syringe. I sloppily spread some on a board, heated the areas that I wanted soldered, then wiped the excess away. It worked beautifully! Digikey sells the substance in larger quantities (produced by Kester). But the smallest container is $41.
Posted at 11:15 am on Jan 17th, 2005 by Joel Johnson
sweet project i think ill have to give it a try ive been trying to make a similar project but a am fm radio not a mp3 player but was having troble finding a fm kit that small
Posted at 3:39 pm on Jan 18th, 2005 by Pyro
where could i buy one of these if any1 is willing i might be up 2 buying 1 for around 100$ its really cool and if anyone sees a site selling let me know or on ebay!
Posted at 9:36 pm on Jan 19th, 2005 by Stuart
does any1 know where i could buy a finished one for more then it costs 2 build if any1 sees a site selling plz post
Posted at 11:52 pm on Jan 19th, 2005 by Stuart
$100.. hah. you must be kidding, , get an ipod shuffle and stick it in an altoids tin.
If you look at her bom, the parts( not even the pcb) come to $60, add in pcb ( which sure could be cheap if they made *a lot*) but in small quantities will cost you something like 20-30
if you can claim your a student( ie you have no moral objection to lieing, or you actually are)
if you do have an objections and olimex won’t take the pcb because the clearances on the board are too close( I never actually checked but their tools seemed to indicate that would be the case)( you’ll shell out $70 for 5 boards from http://www.pcbfabexpress.com most likely)
oh.. and you need a CF card which isn’t on her BOM( I got a 500mb at 20$ AR)
( and regarding the CF card, you will need to format it first in fat16, which shouldn’t be too hard, but it’s other little widget)
oh.. and you want the recharagable lion battery(single cell only)?(that’s not in the BOM either)
so… lets see all that adds up to more than 100. and then there is the amount of time and labor it takes.
in addition:
cost of tools( assuming that you don’t already have them) ?? ( soldering iron .. possibly soldering station (9-100$)
(DMM(digital multimeter is kinda handy for testing connections).. I have no idea how much an Osciliscope costs..I’m planning on skipping that step. Oh, and you will need some kind of programmer to program the microchip PIC (fyi the JDM style programmers and the PIC18F452 tend to disagree just a little)
I’ve heard some people have had quit good success with the brocolli18 programmer, but the design depends on the voltage of your || port and what OS you are running( which if you are clueful you can plan for).
Oh yeah.. and there is shipping and handling ,and in her bom she cites at least 4 different sources( fyi newark tends to adding handling costs if you order is small enought( not that I blame them.. they do some really nifty vacuum sealing in esd bags of all your components).
( for S&H I’d add another say $20-40).
so lets see at a guess, if you could find someone who already had all the tools they needed and was willing to do it all, unless they were doing it full scale as a commercial venture ( at which point there are possibly some ip issues (it is limor’s design and code)).
I’d be highly suprised if you could get someone to make one for you for less than $200.
If you want a cool looking mp3 player for less than that, try yammp-7, assembled they sell it for 150.
Posted at 11:26 am on Jan 20th, 2005 by Dan
dan, dont exagerate so much. Half of the bom was sampled for free. The other half are cheap parts. Since most of the parts were order from digikey, the shipping is greatly reduced. PCB might cost alot, but some students, mainly EE, can make it themselves. If I knew how to program pics, or how to solder smt pics, I would gladly sell for 100 each, minus the cf card. And maybe the battery. And it would have to be 100 upfront. (Got no money base to make then sell ^_^). Tools shouldn’t figure in cause anyone who even tries this has been using them for a while, or should have been.
So lets see. About 25 for the none sampled parts plus 12 for the mp3 decoder. (I was able to sample the cs4340 dac ^_^) plus shipping on both. 15-20 for the board. 2 bucks for the tin (I keep the mints/caffine pills) 57 + 10~15 total shipping, 75 bucks and 25 profit plus experience points. And the person then shells out for the cf and battery. Then again, my time building one is worth atleast 50~75 alone, with internet browsing, phone calling, pic programing and pcb building. The actual solder job would only take bout 3 hours max.
~in semi-dream land~
Posted at 12:18 pm on Jan 20th, 2005 by CDE
ok, so it’s a little inflated. lets say that you charged what your time is worth( since if I successfully did something like this for a lark, I wouldn’t sell the first one I made) and that sampling allows whoever is doing it to have cheaper costs.
cost would then be 125 without CF or battery.
so I’m thinking your basis would put that at say 155-165 with cf and ( assuming lithium ion battery)
btw, nice job sampling the DAC, I didn’t manage to do that, so newark bumps my estimate up a bit too.
Posted at 3:43 pm on Jan 20th, 2005 by Dan
The DAC took a bit of phoning to do. First you go to Cirrus’s site (Or whatever company that makes cs company coded chips site) and use their sample request. That gave me an email saying they couldnt accommodate me with a free sample. So after reading the badly binaried email from CS’s to my dodgeit account, I figured I had to call the local supplier for CS in NJ. It gave me two suppliers from CS’s website. I called one, it was a machine, and the other I had to call three times. Once to get connect to someone who was afk, the second to try to get reconnect with that person (who handles the Rutgers and School of Engineering accounts, so if you a SOE student you might get a free sample or two). The third try resulted in me being connected to someone else, who took the sample order for me with little hesitation. He did tell me that Fedex (i think it was fedex) might not be able to ship to my school’s PO box (which it might since microchip using ups and maxim/dallas with fedex have arrived for me (or viceversa).
*take a breath*
Anyway, thats why I did quoted phone calling under my time list ^_^
And I might end up going with the newer series of DAC’s from cs, the cs4344/5/6/8 series, once I compare the data sheets for that series and Limor’s acquired cs4340. Hell, I might make the dac a swapable part using some yet to be defined molex board to board adaptor for smt chips, and switch and compare without having to pick one and lump it. It also helps in replacing parts that might get shorted or what not.
I think I should write for hackaday. If only I knew what to write about. ^_^
Posted at 9:36 pm on Jan 20th, 2005 by CDE
Okay……. It seems that the microchip sample order was sent with the name cde, and since thats not the name the post office at rutgers knows me as, I might have to reorder that one. The Ti sample might do the same thing as well. But atleast the ti order has my Nick name Geo, a standard for me real name, and my real last name. Hopefully that will work.
Posted at 10:00 pm on Jan 20th, 2005 by CDE
oh, and for anyone actually planning on working on the latest version, the BOM and PCB is *slighly* off in that it references a 20Mhz crystal instead of a 29.4912 crystal.
limor knows , and probably will be updating the bom when she has the free time. but in the meantime for anyone who care and doesn’t want to wait the month or so for the full tutorial.
you can get an appropriate crystal at mouser:
695-HCM49-29.
Posted at 11:38 am on Jan 23rd, 2005 by dan
Limor doesn’t say that she sampled the FTDI chip on the hardware part as well, though it does say on the BOM (Which I still dont know what it stands for… Board ops mech?) I just did the same I did for the cs chips. I email one of the two US suppliers for FTDI. Sampling is great social engineering fun (and practice as well)
Posted at 1:38 pm on Jan 24th, 2005 by CDE
BOM = Bill of Materials.
This project looks great. For those of you who are beginners and want to learn more about electronics, there are FPGA kits out there from Xilinx or Altera (about 80$ to 150 depending on configeration) that allow you to build your own MP3 player and other things. Although, none of these will be as small or well designed as Limor’s.
Posted at 7:06 pm on Jan 25th, 2005 by deenko
think that the kits he will sell will be good (faq #5)
Posted at 9:49 pm on Feb 1st, 2005 by connell
i mean for the new one heis makin that fits in the gum box
Posted at 10:41 pm on Feb 1st, 2005 by connell
Hi just had a question… is there anybody who has turned a USB memory stick /pen drive into an mp3 player? That would be *really* cool (not that this isn’t…). Any tutorials would be appreciated.
Thanks
Posted at 2:20 am on Feb 5th, 2005 by spyderblade
#43 Do you mean like the micro cruzer companion? Like just using a flash drive as the memory instead of a memory card? Whats the point? Both a mp3 player like the minty, and the cruzer companion need an external method to connect to usb to add the files (CF reader for minty, micro cruzer flash drive for Companion). Or do you mean more like the iPod Shuffle (Which I think is what limor is going to do with the mini Minty)?
Posted at 5:07 pm on Feb 7th, 2005 by CDE
please post when you see kits for mini minty for sale
Posted at 5:16 pm on Feb 13th, 2005 by connell
Connell, go sign up for the mailing list. Go to the faq part of the Minty Mp3 page and find the email address.
Posted at 5:05 pm on Feb 14th, 2005 by CDE
i just did
Posted at 5:36 pm on Feb 14th, 2005 by connell
I saw this earlyer but now the site is down. ;_;
Posted at 12:19 pm on Feb 17th, 2005 by george
I finally decided I wanted to take a look at the project but web.media.mit.edu seems to be down today, looking at the google cache just isn’t the same :/
Posted at 6:54 pm on Feb 17th, 2005 by loup
Has anyone tried using the TI DAC cause im having difficulties editing the layout.
Posted at 11:58 pm on Feb 23rd, 2005 by mmoe
hi guys, i’m currently in the process of gathering the parts for this project. I have the pic so far and a programmer and just pooling togethor rest of the power supply stuff now so I can start playing around with the pic. Anyone know a site or a forum or something where people are activly undertaking this project? Already there’s a few things i’ve had some questions about but have just resorted to guessing to the best of my ability as to what the solution is. If there isn’t one I might setup a forum somewhere or something so we can help each other out as it seems the original designer is a little busy at the moment, anyway, if you’re keen to set up a place to communicate about this give me an email at s4027048@nospam.student.uq.edu.au (remove nospam. obviously :P )
Posted at 9:22 pm on Feb 28th, 2005 by jules
hi guys, i’m currently in the process of gathering the parts for this project. I have the pic so far and a programmer and just pooling togethor rest of the power supply stuff now so I can start playing around with the pic. Anyone know a site or a forum or something where people are activly undertaking this project? Already there’s a few things i’ve had some questions about but have just resorted to guessing to the best of my ability as to what the solution is. If there isn’t one I might setup a forum somewhere or something so we can help each other out as it seems the original designer is a little busy at the moment, anyway, if you’re keen to set up a place to communicate about this give me an email at s4027048@nospam.student.uq.edu.au (remove nospam. obviously :P )
Posted at 9:25 pm on Feb 28th, 2005 by jules
Hi,
I’ve set up a forum for peopel who are building minty to come and ask questions or give advice or even gloat if you’ve complete it :)
Come check it out:
It’d be great if we could get a little community happening to help people get this project going.
Cheers!
I have the same question as #43, except I’m wondering about playing mp3s from a USB portable harddrive. It wouldn’t be ultra portable or “sexy” but I have a 40GB hard drive in a generic enclosure, and it would be nice to be able to play mp3s from it in my car or at my desk at work. I don’t want to spend the money for an Ipod or something similar.
Does anyone know how to make this work?
thanks.
Posted at 10:23 am on Mar 4th, 2005 by Jett
This is way too advanced for me, but the allure is undeniable… I keep almost talking myself into it, but I KNOW it wouldn’t turn out well.
Like Jett, (#54) I too have a few hard drives laying around I’d love to stream MP3’s off of in my car… but I don’t know how to do it either.
It anyone can help, I’d be appreciative.
Posted at 10:23 pm on Mar 6th, 2005 by FRS
54 & 55: There is no way of streaming mp3’s straight off a usb or firewire portable hd without the manufacturer buildng in that option. You could buy a mp3 player that uses ata drives and rig something up, or build a car mp3 computer system.
First: find a car mp3 computer project.
Second: Build it
three: …
four: profit
Posted at 5:19 pm on Mar 7th, 2005 by CDE
Limor has started the official Minty forum
http://www.ladyada.net/forums/
Posted at 12:38 pm on Mar 14th, 2005 by cde
why would the manufacturer have to build it into the hard drive.. isn’t that what hacking is all about?
Posted at 5:12 pm on Jun 22nd, 2005 by Semlar
#56 is dead wrong.
I’ve gotten a blueeye 2.5in hdd case working with a vr3 fm transmitter (google both for info), with no serious mods. The key is to make sure the whole assembly has over 500mA supply, because the drive requires about 500mA by itself.
A larger regulator (7805 series) will supply both the +5v USB and the VR3 and will work fine.
Oh, and there’s no reason to use the fm transmitter… the insides are divided into 3 boards: usb/buttons, cpu board and fm transmitter board, so you can route the audio output directly to an amp if you so wish.
Now if I only knew how to shuffle…
Posted at 4:53 am on Sep 6th, 2005 by Bored
Anyone else having a problem accessing http://www.ladyada.net/make/minty/ or any other part of her site?
I cannot seem to find a place where the plans are mirrored either…. damn
Posted at 1:12 pm on Sep 6th, 2005 by candyman
For those who have trouble accessing ladyada.net, try http://web.media.mit.edu/~ladyada/adatoys/minty/hardware.html
Not all links are alive though.
Posted at 5:02 pm on Sep 10th, 2005 by fred
Anyone from the Dallas area that can write programs that will work on the MACs, We need someone to make some modifications to our PC based code (C++) so that it will work on the MACS. Please email me if you are interested and live in the Dallas Area. Its a simple project with nice compensation
Posted at 10:42 pm on Oct 6th, 2005 by morris harris
re: 59
There’s a new VR transmitter that has shuffling.
http://store.yahoo.com/nextpowerusa/viresolavr3v2.html
Posted at 3:28 pm on Feb 17th, 2006 by J
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Posted at 12:43 pm on Jan 13th, 2005 by Al