[Discreet Electronics Guy] sends in his very pocket sized boom box.
One thing we love about [Discreet Electronics Guy]’s projects is how they really showcase that a cool hack is possible without access to 3D printers, overnight PCB services, and other luxuries. Everything in this board is hand made by electronics standards. The board is etched, the vias are wires, and even the case seems to be a modified plastic mint container.
The boombox itself uses an ATiny85 at its core which plays .wav files from an SD card. This is routed through an audio amp which powers two small speakers. We love the volume knob being a board mount potentiometer. The device even features its own small LiON battery pack. If you don’t want to enjoy the deep sound of the two small speakers there’s a headphone jack.
He’s got a great write-up on the circuit design on his website and you can see a video of him presenting the project here or after the break.
What is a “via”? I get that it’s a wire, but how would you define “via”?
Not a wire, but a plated hole in a multi-layer PCB that’s used to carry a signal from one layer to another.
With 2-layer designs, they go all the way through. Things get trickier with 4-layer and higher PCBs.
Heh, one of my early projects went in a tic-tac box. It was a 27mhz RC receiver… Now back then, “regular” RC gear was twice that size and weight, 4x the relative price of todays kit at least, and sub-mini was double the price again, and micro double that (And todays gear is pretty much the size of the old micro). I was tryna do the “parkflyer” before it was cool thing on pocket money. Seemed to work, but never actually flew it, model was an adapted vintage free flight at half size, where the original had been used for RC at full size (It was a magazine plan, not one I’d done the scaling down of) Anyway, free flight test with 30 secs of fuel and 6 oz ballast saw it climbing like the proverbial “home sick angel” and despite it being trimmed to circle, nearly lost it, chasing it a few fields over… It seemed I’d be out of range vertically real quick… never got hold of the next motor size down to tame it, didn’t have enough channels for throttle.
Anyway, they work well for small stuff… another box I used a lot back in the day was a plastic one for bicycle tire repair kits. The local equivalent of a dollar store had them dirt cheap and I bought 3 or 4 just for the boxes.
Something is terribly wrong with the sound in the video, making it a pain to watch.. :/
That happens when people do their audio monitoring/check with a Boombox ಠ_ಠ or too much use of crappy earphones with audio too loud for too long
I love the crudity of this thing, and I don’t mean that to poke fun or criticize it. PCB services are so accessible these days, but the wait and/or delivery time ends up taking so long. There’s something to be said about saying screw it, where’s that bottle of ferric chloride… and just making it yourself. I bet almost every component on this was scavenged broken devices. I think I’m going to have to make one of these for my son now!
Love it!
I have one of these sd card wave players on a protoboard after geting some attiny85s for the first time. Wish I knew assembly programming; really want to squeeze in another button and do secondary hold button functions so I can have next, back, play/pause, and loop.