In the era of digital streaming, the market is full of wireless speakers that will play content from your smartphone or pull it down from the Internet directly over WiFi. But if you’re feeling a bit nostalgic and want to throw on one of your old CDs, well, you might have a problem. That’s the situation [Chad Boughton] recently found himself in, so he decided to build a compact CD player that could discreetly connect up to his fancy Klipsch speaker.
The optical drive itself was the easy part, as [Chad] already had a laptop-style drive in an external enclosure that he could liberate. But of course, the speaker wouldn’t know what to do with an external disc drive, so there needed to be an intermediary. Enter the Raspberry Pi.
It might not look like it at first glance, but that’s a Pi 3 tucked into the back of the 3D printed frame. It would have been too tall in its original configuration, so [Chad] removed the USB and Ethernet ports; a modification we’ve covered in the past. Of course, he still needed to use the USB ports, so he ended up soldering the two cables — one to the CD drive and the other to the back of the speaker — directly to the Pi.
When plugged into the Raspberry Pi, the Klipsch speaker shows up as a USB audio device, so the software side of things was relatively simple. [Chad] installed VLC to handle CD playback, but he still needed a way to control everything. To that end, a IR receiver hooked up to the Pi’s GPIO pins means the Pi can detect the signals coming from the speaker’s original remote and pass the appropriate command on to VLC. The whole thing is very well integrated, and you could be forgiven for thinking it might be some kind of stock upgrade module at first glance.
Despite recently celebrating its 40th birthday, the CD is unlikely to completely disappear from our lives anytime soon. Manufacturers can turn their back on the standard if they want, but so long as folks still want to play them, they’ll keep coming up with inventive ways to make it happen.
I just acquired a HP laptop CD drive from our E_Waste bin at work (they let me raid it from time to time) so maybe this article will inspire a project!
This seems super overkill. Instead of a PI you can use an arduino to send IDE commands to the drive to play, stop, pause, skip track (if the cd drive is indeed IDE…)
Prolly a 555 would do?
Do these laptop style optical drives even have analog output, because you’d still need a DAC and some sort of processing in addition to the ide commands. It probably is way overkill using a pi but it’s arguably the cheapest and easiest way to get a working prototype in under a few hours.
Being a sucker for physical media I love it, my only complaint is it would look better with a slot loading cd player. but that’s just aesthetics.
My first thought too. I once modded an external slot loading drive by removing the top metal cover and replacing it with a piece of clear plexi. It looks really cool loading and playing a disc. I kind of want to recreate this project with that drive mounted vertically so you could watch the disc play. I have a sony micro system that does exactly this but it’s quite bulky compared to how small a laptop optical drive is.
I used to have a portable with it stripped down naked (danger!) so you snap on a disc first press play and see it spin up. That’s close to a vinyl experience, see it slow down as it plays out. Loading mechanics with trays and slots are more of a problem than the reading head in my experience, because of rubber belts.
Does that laptop CD drive has USB interface? I always thought they were SATA (or IDE).
They are probably using a usb to sata/ide adapter (like those found in enclosures for these drives)
I’ve always loved the gentle click they make when the drawer opens…