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.
Gates are good and have utility far beyond envy
You can still get them: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01NAJ3KQB
It uses a rknano rather than 8051 though.
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.
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.
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.