One of the best things about adulthood is that finally we get to, in most cases, afford ourselves the things that our parents couldn’t (or just didn’t for whatever reason). When [Yakroo108] was a child, Walkmans were expensive gadgets that were out of reach of the family purse. But today, we can approximate these magical music machines ourselves with off-the-shelf hardware.
Besides the cyberpunk aesthetic, the main attraction here is the UNIHIKER Linux board running the show. After that, it’s probably a tie between that giant mystery knob and the super-cool GUI made with Tkinter.
We also like the fact that there are two displays: the smaller one on the SSD1306 OLED handles the less exciting stuff like the volume level and the current time, so that the main UNIHIKER screen can have all the equalizer/cyberpunk fun.
Speaking of, this user-friendly GUI shows play/stop buttons and next buttons, but it looks like there’s no easy way to get to the previous track. To each their own, we suppose. Everything is enclosed in a brick-like 3D-printed enclosure that mimics early Walkmans with orange foam headphones.
If you want an updated Walkman with keyboard switches (who wouldn’t?), check this out.
Entire ARM SoC running Linux just to play songs? In late 2000s I could buy $15 mp3 player based on 8051 and it worked for hours on a single AAA battery or NiMH cell.
this is called gatekeeping, it’s usually used by insicure people to undermine others they envy or dislike.
*insecure
Gates are good and have utility far beyond envy
I would say maybe “this thing serves no purpose” it more then likely doesn’t even have a quality D/A chip and amplifier.
Nah, it’s just an observation of how things change in strange ways. Not every comment referencing the past contains malice for young people.
If you read carefully you’ll see that they said absolutely nothing about how people should do things their way or that the young folk aren’t valid “hackers” or whatever. No gate is being kept whatsoever.
You can still get them: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01NAJ3KQB
It uses a rknano rather than 8051 though.
If we bought everything off the shelf and did not aspire to build our own, there would be no hackaday.
This has inspired me to build a cyber deck of a different type as well. I love the idea of a walkman style cyberdeck. Maybe throw in some other co features like bus pirate style interface.
I had one of those too. Let’s set expectations aside a bit and think about the practical aspects of that though. How many engineers do you think it took to make that product? How much time?
This person pulled off what 15 years ago seemed like a mostly unlikely task for an individual to do. I’m guessing but it probably only took them a couple of days by themselves to do it too. This thing has lots of other features compared too what you and I used to play music from.
Look at the thing. What does that knob do? A secondary touch screen volume control. This both fun and awesome. I wonder if you could play a game on it like the later gen. ipods.
Couple of dudes in China, maybe 6 months and they’re still making them for developing countries. It took more time for Hitler to conquer Soviet Union.
oh brrr. Godwins law. you smell badly sir, you do.
The aesthetic is excellent. Nice work!
I get that this is an impressive project but… nothing even close to any Walkman I remember.
Hard to judge its size. It would be cool to see this next to a WM-10 Walkman.
Surely there’s a way to get audio out of that board without resorting to a USB wart, no?
Hmm. A microphone but no audio out on the board. Odd.
That edge connector has a bunch of I/O. No plain audio and I don’t see I2S, but there’s two SPI ports, two I2C ports, and a raft of PWMs.
It needs something orange, maybe padding, on the earbuds, maybe some metallic blue paint… looks more Ono Sendai (pretty nice) than Sony.
Nothing wrong with piecing together whatever to pull something off. MP3’s are so old, can it play flac?
My gripe is bouncing bars or an actual spectrum display is not an equalizer. This started as a way to put bling on box stereos. I had to tell a friend who proudly showed his new 10 band EQ stereo how to adjust the mid bass down that there was no equalizer just bass and treble to control. Big florescent display with 10 band spectrum display but no EQ. He knew what an EQ could do just not where the controls were, that’s why he bought it. Expense with no return in performance. A lot of people fall for this ruse. Please don’t use the term if it is not an equalizer.
Even worse that random bouncing graphic that has no relevance to what is heard. A VU meter would be welcome on any player or stream. I wish VLC had one like Audacity has, a thin display with 4 stats at once.
I don’t get it. It doesn’t look like any walkman I’ve ever seen. More like the first generation of hard drive MP3 players like the original ipod. It’s nothing more than another “I stuffed an rpi into a quaint enclosure” type project.
Notice the USB dongle hanging off the side? That’s the part doing the actual audio playback, no headphone jack in this ‘walkman’.
Pretty nice but i wonder if it can be made cheaper by using the esp32 version of the unihiker because i dont think you need a full embedded linux board for the functionality